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THE SECRET OF THE EAST ; 



OR, 



THE ORIGIN OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION, 

AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ITS RISE 

AND DECLINE. 




FELIX, OSWALD, M.D. 






BOSTON?-.^ 

INDEX ASSOCIATION, 44 BOYLSTON STREET. 
1883. 



L>V7^ 



,01 



Copyright, 

1883. 



TO 



THE MEMOBY OF 



JORDANUS BRUNO, 

THE HEKOIC APOSTLE OF 

NATURE, FREEDOM, AND TRUE RELIGION, 

THIS WOBK IS KEVEBENTLY DEDICATED 
BY THE AUTHOE. 



PREFACE. 



The right of free inquiry is the first condition 
of progress, and dogmatists who dispute that right 
virtually impeach the evidence or the morality of 
their own dogmas. An exception from that rule 
may, under certain conditions, be admitted in 
favor of theological tenets. Unobtrusive mystics 
have a right to expound the unknowable after 
their own fashion. The priests of Isis and the 
adepts of the Eleusinian Mysteries had the priv- 
ilege to veil the secrets of their sacred rites. 
The discreet Pythagoreans could not be obliged to 
explain the bean-law of their master or their rea- 
son for believing in his ghost-stories as firmly as 
in the evidence of his geometrical theorems. 
Even nocturnal devil-worshippers may be per 
mitted to mumble about their altars, if they do 
not dress them at the expense of their neighbors. 

But it alters the case, if such creeds become 
aggressive. The right of secrecy does not pertain 
to religions that have devastated our earth by a 
series of murderous wars, that have enforced their 



THE SECRET OF THE EAST, 

anti-natural dogmas by destroying the prosperity 
of whole nations, and their ghost-dogmas by the 
torture and slaughter of millions ; religions which, 
after the loss of their political power, have used 
all their moral influence to obstruct the progress 
of freedom and science, to arrogate the education 
of our children, and to interfere with the recrea- 
tions of our holidays, — all under the pretext of 
promoting the propaganda of an infallible revela- 
tion. The votaries of such creeds cannot plead 
the privileges of the ancient mystics, for the right 
to investigate their claims has become a social and 
religious duty. Those who recognize that duty 
will approve the purpose of the present work. 

Felix L. Oswald. 
Cincinnati, September, 1883. 



CONTENTS. 



iNTRODUCTIOBr, 9 

I. The Genesis of Pessimism, 15 

II. Buddha axd his Galilean Successob, ... 23 

in. The Ethics of the Cheistian Religion, . . 33 

rv. The Conveksion of Eubope, 52 

Y. The Night of the IMiddle Ages, 65 

VI. An Expensive Cbeed, 78 

VII. Daybbeak, 93 

VIII. The Pbotestant Revolt 104 

IX. Regenesis, 115 

Appendix, 122 



THE SEOEET OF THE EAST; 



OK, 



The Origin of thk Christian Religion and the 
Significance of its Rise and Decline. 



INTRODUCTION. 

"Who has unlocked the gates of the morning ?"—Sadi. 

The wisest man of aU nations and times warns 

the seeker after truth against the influence of what 

he calls the "idols (or illusions) of the tribe";* 

that is, the traditional prejudices of his nation, 

family, or sect, or, in other words, against the bias 

of confounding hearsays with the results of our 

own investigations. To him who could divest 

himself of that bias, the history of civilization 

during the last twenty centuries would present 

itself in the succession of the following prominent 

phenomena : — 

I. 

The development of a great cosmopolitan em- 
pire. The military rigor of a belligerent common- 
wealth, gradually relaxing under the influence of 
prosperity and international commerce. Political 
absolutism, co-existent with an almost unlimited 
personal, social, and intellectual freedom. A flour- 
ishing state of husbandry. Industrial progress in 

* Novum Organon, lib. i., cap. 3. 



1,0 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

the direction of architectural and agricultural im- 
provements. An optimistic religion, founded on 
a symbolic nature-worship, and supplemented, or 
partly supplanted, by three rival systems of nat- 
uralistic philosophy. Universal tolerance of all 
tolerant religions. An excellent system of phys- 
ical education. Flourishing schools of philosophy, 
natural science, jurisprudence, rhetoric, and medi- 
cine. Liberal patronage of the fine arts. Un- 
paralleled material prosperity, flourishing cities, 
active commerce, excellent roads. Love of health 
and recognition of its social importance, free 
aqueducts, free baths and gymnasia. The opti- 
mism of the popular religion manifested in the 
general worship of joy, cheerful festivals, inspiring 
athletic games and field sports, though in the 
larger cities the want of better diversions leading 
to the brutal excesses of the gladiatorial combats. 
^Esthetic culture evinced in the love of scenic and 
artistic beauty, poetry and music. 

Summary: Nature-worship, agriculture, indus- 
trial and scientific progress, commercial activity. 
Wealth, luxury, and their concomitant vices, offset 
by a naturalistic philosophy, and the love of ath- 
letic sports, physical education and health-promot- 
ing institutions. Intellectual and aesthetic culture, 
tolerance, material prosperity, and the successful 
pursuit of earthly happiness. 

IL 

A general eclipse of common sense and science. 
A wide-spread epidemic of anti-naturalism, mira- 
cle-worship, and self-torture. Kapid decline of 



INTRODUCTION. 11 

industry. The neglect of rational agriculture 
turning thousands of fertile fields into deserts. 
Systematic suppression of political, personal, and 
intellectual liberty. Religious terrorism, culminat- 
ing in man hunts and wholesale massacres. Gen- 
eral ignorance, brutal abasement of the lower 
classes. Squalid misery of domestic life, general 
indifference to the beauties of nature and the bless- 
ings of health. A thousand years' interregnum 
of science, Faith usurping the throne of Reason, 
every branch of human knowledge withered by 
the poison of supernaturalism, literary activity 
limited to the production of homilies and miracle- 
legends, education devoted to the suppression of 
all natural instincts and the substitution of sub- 
missive belief for the love of truth and free in- 
quiry. Decadence of the fine arts, natural science 
merged in a deluge of superstition. 

Summary : Darkness, misery, and slavery, 

in. 

The dawn of a new day. Reason awakening 
from her long slumber. A spirit of free inquiry 
arraigning its votaries against the authority of 
tradition. Gradual emancipation of common 
sense. The success of a dogmatic insurrection 
followed by an unprecedented revival of intellect- 
ual activity, superstitions and abuses succumbing 
to the successive triumphs of science. Social re- 
construction, the recognition of human rights, a 
general reform of juristic, administrative, and mu- 
nicipal institutions, education redeemed from the 
tyranny of anti-naturalism. Development of new 



12 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

sciences, new arts, and new branches of literature. 
The increase of general prosperity furthered by 
the progress of natural science, industry, and 
rational agriculture, but retarded by the influence 
of mediaeval reactions and lingering prejudices. 
Material advantages counteracted by hereditary 
vices, the purpose of free institutions partly de- 
feated by traditional superstitions and hereditary 
moral cowardice. 

Summary: Traditional prejudices obstructing 
the propaganda of a rationalistic reform, the after- 
effects of moral and physical poisons resisting the 
healing agencies of Nature. But, on the whole, 
progress in the direction of light, freedom, and 
happiness. 

The most important problem in the history of 
civilization is now the question : Whence this great 
sunburst of knowledge ? What magic has broken 
the spell of the dreadful night? How has the 
sunshine of our life been restored ? Is it the dawn 
of a new day, or the end of an unnatural eclipse ? 

The most frequent answer to these inquiries is 
the theory which ascribes the blessings of modern 
civilization to the influence of the system of 
dogmas and traditions known as the Christian Re- 
ligion. The doctrine of the New Testament, we are 
told, is the leaven of the moral universe, the re- 
forming agency that has redeemed the world from 
vice and barbarism. Only Christian nations have 
entered the path of progress. Virtue, humanity, 
and true peace can prosper only in the shadow 
of the cross. In the night of the Middle Ages, 
the Bible was our beacon; and, as the cloud- 



INTRODUCTIOX. 13 

pillar of a heavenly guide, it will lead our further 
progress. 

But, in examining the claims of these theorists, 
the impartial inquirer cannot overlook the follow- 
ing objections: 1. That the rise of the Christian 
faith coincides with the sunset of the great South- 
European civilization; 2. That the zenith of its 
power coincides with the midnight of mediaeval 
barbarism; 3. That the decline of its influence 
coincides with the sunrise of a North-European 
civilization; 4. That all the principal victories of 
Freedom and Science have been achieved in spite 
of the Church, in spite of her utmost efforts to 
thwart or diminish their triumph, that only in 
consequence of the futility of these efforts the 
heresies of one age have become the truisms of the 
next, so that Christianity has always marched in 
the rear of civilization ; 5. That the exponents of 
the Christian dogmas persist in their hostility to 
the progress of a reform which they recognize only 
by condescending to share the fruits of its former 
victories; 6. That the worst enemies of political 
and intellectual liberty were firm believers in the 
dogmas of the New Testament, while the direct or 
indirect repudiation of those dogmas has been the 
fundamental tenet of nearly every great thinker, 
scholar, or statesman, till the degree of Protestant- 
ism has become the chief test of intellectual sanity ; 
7. That, .among the contemporary nations of the 
Christian world, the most sceptical are the most 
civilized, while the most orthodox are the most 
backward in freedom, industry, and general intelli- 
gence. 



14 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

But, on the other hand, if the creed of the 
Middle Ages was a pernicious superstition, how 
could its exponents succeed in fastening their yoke 
upon so many noble and manly nations? How 
were they able to suppress the healthier instincts 
of the human race, and perpetuate their power for 
nearly sixteen centuries ? By what baneful magic 
could the worst enemies of human happiness main- 
tain themselves upon the throne of religion and 
morality ? 

The solution of the enigma has long been a half- 
open secret, and, but for the clouds in the east, 
should long have ceased to be a secret at all. One 
by one, the covering veils have since been lifted, 
till even the blind could have recognized the pal- 
pable facts ; but though palpable, and often glar- 
ingly visible, they have never yet become audible. 
Their discoverers have been silenced with fire and 
poison, with threats and bribes. Their promulga- 
tion has been deprecated in the name of piety, in 
the name of prudence, in the name of social wel- 
fare, in the name of morality ; nay, in the name of 
heaven and in the name of heaven's God. In the 
course of the last eighteen hundred years, that God 
has been appealed to under many strange pre- 
texts. Let us for once invoke his aid in the name 
of Truth. 



CHAPTER I. 

THE GENESIS OF PESSIMISM. 

"Woe to the Sphinx, if we can solve her riddle."— J^ P. 
Eichter. 

About twenty-four hundred years ago, a relig- 
ious Hindu retired to the hills of Barabar, near 
Gaya, to meditate upon the problem of life and 
the origin of evil. The Ceylon Buddhists date 
the advent of their religion from 534 B.C., but 
geographical traditions are generally more reliable 
than chronological records ; and between Behar and 
Patna, on the Upper Ganges, the traveller of the 
future may linger in the valley of the Bar Mo- 
hanan to visit the fountain of the great Marah, the 
well of bitterness that has poisoned the life- 
springs of so many hundred nations, and still 
mixes its gall with the sources of our moral 
food. 

Near Buddha-Gaya, in the solitude of the Bara- 
bar hill-forests, the mind of the brooding Hindu 
evolved a system which has the theoretical advan- 
tage of consistency. He proposed to solve the 
problem of existence on the nihilistic plan, and 
avoid the disappointments of life by renouncing 
its hopes. The hope of earthly happiness, accord- 
ing to the theory of Buddha Sakyamuni, is a 
chimera, a phantom that lures us from error to 
error through endless toils, and robs even the 
grave of its peace ; for he who dies uncured of his 



16 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

delusion must return to earth, and continue the 
hopeless chase in another life. Quietism — i.e., an- 
nihilation of desire — is the only hope of emancipa- 
tion ; and that goal of peace can be reached only 
by total abstinence from earthly pleasures. All 
worldly blessings are curses in disguise, and he 
alone who has lifted the veil of that disguise has 
entered the path of salvation. To him, self-denial 
becomes the highest wisdom, and self-abhorrence 
the supreme virtue. He must court sorrow and 
disappointment as others woo the smiles of fort- 
une, he must avoid everything that could recon- 
cile him to life and lure him back to the delusions 
of worldly pursuits. Life is a disease, and death 
the only cure. The highest goal of the future is 
Nirvana, peace and absolute deliverance from the 
vexations of earthly desires. All human knowl- 
edge is vain, the great object of life being the 
suppression of our natural instincts. Self-aflBlic- 
tion is the only rational pursuit. The love of 
wealth is folly: the slaves of covetousness forge 
fetters for their own feet. True believers should 
seek temporal peace by curtailing their wants and 
cultivating the virtue of indifference to the vicissi- 
tudes of fortune. He who strives after higher 
merit must renounce all earthly possessions, live 
on alms, dress in rags, shave his head, and abstain 
from marriage, merry-makings, and the use of 
animal food. He must have no fixed habitation, 
and must even avoid to sleep twice under the same 
tree, lest an undue affection for any earthly object 
should hinder his spirit in the progress of its 
emancipation from the vanities of life I 



THE GENESIS OF PESSIMISM. 17 

According to the Indian tradition, Mahar, the 
prince of the earth-spirits, exhausted all his re- 
sources to prevent the promulgation of the new 
dogma. But, unfortunately for the happiness of 
the human race, the efforts of Mahar proved una- 
vailing. Buddha Sakyamuni preached his gospel 
with the zeal of a divine messenger. His apostles 
infested all Northern and Eastern Hindostan. Fifty 
years after his death, the doctrine of anti-natural- 
ism had superseded the native religions of Cash- 
mere, Cabul, Candahar, Bactria, and Burmah; 
and, five hundred years later, a modified form of 
the Buddha gospel was preached on the shores of 
the Mediterranean,* and the mania of pessimism 
spread westward and northward with all the symp- 
toms attending the dissemination of an unnatural 
vice. Vices are perverted instincts, and by fasten- 
ing upon the basis of a natural propensity usurp 
its functions and its resources. Hence their per- 
sistency. The propaganda of Buddhism owed its 
first success to the enthusiasm of its apostle ; but 
what is the secret of its further progress ? What 
innate bias of the human mind has furnished the 
basis of its development, — in the cultus of the 
eastern nations, as well as in the mind of its 
founder ? 

Gnosticism, Essenism, Sufism, and the doctrines 
of the New Testament, with all the various subdi- 
visions of its votaries, are so many excrescences of 
the Buddhistic parent-tree ; and an exegetical refer- 
ence to their complex mysticism would be an ex- 
planation per obscurius. But like other dogmas, 
and nearly all the myths of the Aryan races, Buddh- 



18 THE SECRET OP THE EAST. 

ism has a germ in the great pantheon of Brah- 
manism. In the Sanskara, or book of sacraments, 
the law of Menu lays down a special code of relig- 
ious ordinances for every period of life, and 
assigns to extreme old age the duty of certain 
ascetic practices, which were supposed to harmon- 
ize with the natural quietism attending the subsid- 
ence of the passions and vital energies. 

"When a man perceives his body flagging," says 
the Sanskara, "when he sees his hair becoming 
gray, when he has seen the son of his son, let him 
leave his home and retire into the solitude of the 
forest. He is to live on herbs, roots, and fruits, 
not to cut his hair or nails, and busy himself only 
with the Vedas and the contemplation of Brahm, 
in order to approach perfection in piety and sci- 
ence"; i.e., he is to renounce worldly occupa- 
tions and retire to the solitude of the woods, as 
Felix Sylla retired to his Apulian farm-house, and 
way-worn Firdusi to the hermitage of Thuss. 
"Peace returns," says Dr. Zimmermann, "at an 
age when solitude is enough to make a hermitage 
pleasant." Under the influence of sorrow and in- 
firmity, old men become instinctive pessimists. 
]^ature practises her delusions for wise purposes 
of her own. She baits her matrimonial traps with 
visions of Elysium, and reconciles her children to 
the gathering shadows of the long night by exag- 
gerating the disappointments of the day and the 
recollection of its fatigues. And, even at the end 
of a pleasant evening, rest becomes sweet enough 
to be desired for its own sake. 

But this quietude of the sunset hour Buddha 



THE GENESIS OF PESSIMISM. 19 

Sakyamuni attempts to enforce in the morning of 
life, his disciples are to seek refuge in sleep before 
their day's work is done, he gathers dry leaves 
to bury the budding flower. Like the genius of 
death, he depreciates life by dwelling upon the 
vanity of its hopes ; and the secret of his success 
is to be found in the circumstance that in every 
human breast there is a germ of this feeling which 
may be stimulated into premature activity. Pes- 
simism is precocious senility. It is a reversion of 
the vital instincts. Even in the prime of life, the 
systematic suppression of all our natural desires 
will lead to that weariness of earth which nature 
had intended to deaden the sorrow of the parting 
hour, as we may force a plant to return as dust to 
dust by depriving it of its flowers and green leaves. 
Young pessimists resemble the fruits that rot 
before they ripen. • Monastic tendencies imply an 
abnormal condition of the human mind. ■ Only a 
defeated warrior, a man without hope and without 
courage, can find solace in contemplating the ap- 
proach of a premature night. 

Buddhism and its daughter-creed can flourish 
only in a sickly soil. Christianity developed its 
first germs in the carcass of the decaying Roman 
Empire, and still retains its firmest hold upon the 
degenerate nations of Southern Europe ; while the 
manlier races of the North resisted its propaganda 
to the last, and were the first to free themselves 
from its despotism, — just as Buddhism has been 
expelled from the homes of the Aryan races and 
relegated to the moral pest-house of the South 
Mongol empires, for in Japan its Influence is con- 



20 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

fined to the observance of a few traditional cere- 
monies. Disease, crushing misfortune, mental de- 
rangement, whatever disqualifies a man for the 
healthy business of life, qualifies him for the 
reception of anti-natural dogmas. Marasmus and 
pessimism are as concomitant as optimism and 
health. Crippled foxes decry the vintage. Caged 
murderers, like gouty libertines, generally become 
devout. Nearly every scaffold orator edifies his 
audience by the enunciation of orthodox senti- 
ments. Superannuated coquettes revenge them- 
selves by denouncing the illusions of a world that 
neglects them. Unmasked hypocrites console 
themselves with the hope of a better hereafter. 
When the gods of war rejected his appeal, Charles 
IV. of Spain solaced his spirit by embroider- 
ing a petticoat for the Holy Virgin. The apos- 
tles of pessimism were mostly men who had 
reason to revenge themselves upon nature. Rancd, 
the founder of the New Trappists, became devout 
in consequence of a domestic tragedy, Ignatius 
Loyola after the siege of Pampeluna where he 
was crippled and disfigured, Raimund Lullius' 
quietism dated from the infidelity of his bride, 
and Count Stolberg's from the death of his wife. 
Swift, Schopenhauer, and Hannah More were 
martyrs to chronic headache, Dante was an exile, 
and Calvin a dyspeptic. 

Tradition says that Buddha Sakyamuni entered 
upon his mission only after he had exhausted the 
pleasures of wealth and luxury. The debilitating 
effects of superannuation may thus be anticipated ; 
and, if the vital energies have been spent to the 



THE GENESIS OF PESSIMISM. 21 

dregs, night and rest become the summum honum. 
Lethe is a refuge from the weariness of surfeit 
as well as from the infirmities of old age; and, 
under the influence of that weariness, Sakyamuni 
perhaps recognized its remedy, and mistook it for a 
panacea. 

"He interdicts the sweetmeats that have become 
indigestible to his stomach," as Voss explained the 
pessimism of his friend Stolberg. The gratifica- 
tion of our natural instincts is, indeed, a sin against 
the cardinal tenet of a creed which identifies 
nature with the origin of evil. Hence, that worship 
of sorrow, which is the distinctive dogma of the two 
anti-natural religions, and which has so perverted 
their ethics that they refuse to recognize the merit 
of any virtue which they cannot exaggerate or mis- 
construe into a duty of self-afBLiction. 

Pessimism is essentially the creed of decrepi- 
tude. Moribund impotence pleases itself in the 
idea that her lot is preferable to that of the sur- 
vivors, and from that idea there is but a step to 
the blasphemous thought that life itself is a delu- 
sion, and earth a "vale of tears," a land of sorrow 
and disappointments. A eupeptic boy with a sincere 
predilection for such dogmas would be a monster 
per defectum, a being devoid of the instincts of 
content and gratitude. Hence, we find that, in 
spite of all street missions, the name of the Young 
Men's Christian Association is a misnomer, its 
conventicles being attended chiefly by old women 
of both sexes. Hence, also the frequency of "sick- 
bed conversions," — 

"The Devil was sick, the Devil a monk would be." 



22 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

The evils caused by our sins against the health 
laws of nature our ignorance, indolence, and arro- 
gance prefer to ascribe to an inherent defect of her 
constitution. We find it easier to pine for the gar- 
dens of the New Jerusalem than to replant the 
trees of our wasted earthly paradise. 

Pessimism and anti-naturalism are inseparable 
correlatives. Buddha saw that the healthiest and 
noblest instincts of the human mind were opposed 
to his system, and met the difficulty by the total 
depravity dogma. In order to justify the conclu- 
sions of his diseased imagination, he had to deny 
the competence of mental health, and did not hes- 
itate to denounce our natural instincts as the 
sources of original sin. A declaration of war against 
nature was the logical outcome of his system. 

Every religion reflects the moral character of its 
birthplace : Odin-worship, the martial barbarism 
of the old Northland ; Judaism, the loyal faith and 
the stern morality of the Hebrew shepherds; 
Islam, the chivalrous enthusiasm of the free Arab ; 
Stoicism and Epicurism (which had supplanted the 
ethical functions of an obsolete mythological sys- 
tem), the manliness and the optimistic common 
sense of the ancient Greeks. Of all the countries 
of the earth, ancient India was the most cursed 
with the evils of despotism, with abject and hope- 
less social degradation, with fantastic superstitions, 
combined with a neglect of all the sciences that 
could have enabled an inquirer to ascertain the 
true cause of human sufferings and their proper 
remedies. India, the seed-plot of the most con- 
tagious diseases and the home of the opium-habit, 
was the birthland of Pessimism. 



CHAPTER IT. 

BUDDHA AND HIS GALILEAN SUCCESSOR. 
"Ex Oriente Lux." 

In the morning hour of reawakening reason, 
when men tried to explain religious traditions 
without questioning the infallibility of their truth, 
it must have sorely puzzled many an honest in- 
quirer to reconcile certain dogmas of the Church 
with the daily evidence of his senses ; for in- 
stance, the innate purity and candor of young 
children with the doctrine of natural depravity, or 
the mental and moral degeneration of the most 
orthodox communities with the dogma of regener- 
ation by faith. 

But, wherever indoctrination had not yet utterly 
deadened the instinct of truth, the most perplex- 
ing of all tenets must have been the theory which 
considers the two books of the Christian Bible as 
consistent and mutually confirmatory parts of a 
harmonious revelation. Unreasoning faith may 
have repeated the conventional formulas of that 
dogma, but only wilful blindness could ever defend 
it upon the internal evidence of the facts. Jean 
Bodin, a French mystic of the sixteenth century, 
wrote a book in which he bemoans the growing 
scepticism of the age, and, after demonstrating the 
reality of witchcraft by a long list of prodigies 
and ghost-stories, gives his reasons for enforcing 



24 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

the penal code against heretics, with full instruc- 
tions for their discovery and torture. If that book 
had been published as an appendix to the philo- 
sophical works of Lucius Seneca, and under the 
name of the great pagan moralist, the absurdity of 
the mistake could not have been more glaring than 
that of the orthodox Bible theory. 

As a continuation — a second part, as it were — 
of the Hebrew Scriptures, the New Testament 
would be utterly inexplicable. Perhaps no other 
two books ever published are more dissimilar in 
their tendencies. Here, the chronicle of a brave 
and simple-minded nation of shepherds and hus- 
bandmen and the code of their manful law-giver, 
an honest system of morals, rustic and somewhat 
austere, but with a realistic basis and a practical 
purpose ; there, a compilation of contradictory 
miracle-legends and anti-natural dogmas. Here, an 
honest silence on the unknowable mysteries of a 
future existence, a consistent avoidance of the im- 
mortality tenet ; there, a constant petitio principii of 
that dogma : here, a stern inculcation ; there, a con- 
stant violation of the first commandment : here, 
health-laws, Samson traditions, and pastoral po- 
etry ; there, indifference to health, to manly strength, 
and the gifts of our mother earth. Here, nature, 
agnostic candor, optimism and realism ; there, su- 
pernatural and anti-natural dogmas, mysticism, 
sophistry, and gnostic phantoms. The ethical char- 
acteristics of the two books would be a sufficient 
proof against the alleged origin of the New 
Testament, but there is an equally strong pre- 
sumption that the so-called historical elements of 



BUDDHA AND HIS GALILEAN SUCCESSOR. 25 

that work are almost wholly fabulous. The com- 
mittee of the church-council that made the "four 
Gospels" the canons of their faith had to select 
them from fifty-four contradictory versions. The 
evangelists themselves contradict each other on 
many essential points; and their chronicles can 
hardly have been written before the end of the 
second century, as not one of the earlier fathers 
(before Irenseus) ever quotes a single passage of 
their text, while they relate many events which 
seem to have been recorded in the apocrypha. 
These apocrypha, like the arbitrarily excepted 
works, originated in a century so prolific of spuri- 
ous prophecies, forged epistles and biographies, 
that it has justly been called the age of pious 
frauds. The four Gospels, as well as the larger 
part of the Pauline Epistles, were repudiated by 
the Socinians, and others of the more intelligent 
sects of the early Christians. It is equally certain 
that the stupendous events supposed to have at- 
tended the appearance of the new prophet are not 
recorded by any contemporary pagan author, and 
that the short passage in the seventh chapter of 
Josephus is a clumsy forgery. Josephus, who 
describes the reign of Herod in its minutest 
details, never mentions the miracles of Bethlehem, 
the appearance of a new star, the massacre of the 
innocents, or the prodigies of the crucifixion. 

Besides, the rhetoric of the New Testament is 
throughout illustrative rather than persuasive : it is 
the eloquence which distinguishes the communica- 
tion of transmitted from the introduction of origi- 
nal ideas. And, as Feuerbach well observes, the 



26 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

testator's strange neglect to insure the record of 
his revelation by committing it to writing is a 
strong presumption that he delivered his gospel as 
a pre-recorded doctrine. 

But all such discoveries led only to negative 
results, and increased the obscurity of the main 
question, when the study of the Oriental classics, 
that had shed a flood of light upon the etymology 
of the West- Aryan languages, began to elucidate 
the mysteries of Biblical exegesis. Dark words 
were traced to their origin, occult passages as- 
sumed a meaning, perplexing contradictions be- 
came suggestive analogies. Buddhism not only 
explained the doctrines of the New Testament, but 
harmonized them by revealing the root-dogma 
which forms the connecting link of their logical 
correlation. The doctrine of Pessimism is the 
naaster-key to the ethical enigmas of the Christian 
creed. If the blessings of earth are curses in 
disguise, it behooves the wise to renounce his 
material possessions, and despise the precautious 
by which the worldly-minded seek to protect them- 
selves against want and misfortune. If our nat- 
ural instincts are wholly evil, it would be merito- 
rious to love our enemies and hate our father, 
mother, sister, brother, and children, "yea, and 
our own life." If God has created a world the 
sorrows of which so far exceed its blessings, it 
would be perfectly consistent to expect in a future 
life a similar proportion of good to evil : Heaven 
for the elect — ten or twelve out of ten thousand ; 
for the rest, an eternity of frightful tortures. If 
the pursuit of earthly happiness is a chimera, the 



BUDDHA AND HIS GALILEAN SUCCESSOR. 27 

children of light should prove their freedom from 
that delusion by the mortification of their desires 
and natural impulses : fasting, passive submission 
to injustice, sackcloth and ashes, and celibacy.* 

The anti-cosmic tendency of the Christian doc- 
trine distinguishes it from all religions except 
Buddhism. In the language of the New Testa- 
ment, the "world" is everywhere a synonyme of 
evil and sin; the flesh, everywhere the enemy of 
the spirit. And, when the first Christian mission- 
aries reached the sacred cities of Thibet, they were 
astounded to recognize in the sacraments and cere- 
monies of Buddhism all the essential features of 
their own cultus. The Transactions of the Royal 
Asiatic Society (Vol. II., p. 491) mentions the 
"celibacy of the Buddhist clergy, and the monastic 
life of the societies of both sexes, to which might 
be added their strings of beads, their manner of 
chanting prayers, their incense and their candles. 
Confession of sins is regularly practised," 

Father Hue, in his Recollections of a Journey in 
Tartary, Thibet, and China (Hazlitt's translation), 
says, "The cross, the mitre, the dalmatica, the 
cope, — which the Grand Lama wears on his jour- 
neys, or if he is performing some ceremony out 
of the temple, — the service with double choirs, the 
psalmody, the exorcisms, the censer suspended 

*Matt. xix., 12. etc. Referring to this passage, Strauss, 
in his Life of Jtsus (Vol. I., p. 618 of the first edition), 
says, "In order to defend Christ against the charge of 
unpractical principles, the Christian apologists bave made 
haste to smuggle in the idea (,den Gedanken einzti- 
schwdrzen) that Jesus recommended celibacy only to 
his disciples, and in anticipation of the peculiar difficulties 
of their apostolic mission; but the truth is that in this as in 
other passages the spirit of asceticism reveals itself too 
plainly to be mistaken." 



28 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

from five chains, and which you can open or 
close at pleasure; the benediction given by the 
Lamas by extending the right hand over the heads 
of the faithful, the chaplet, ecclesiastical celibacy, 
religious retirement, the worship of the saints, the 
fasts, the processions, the litanies, the holy water, 
— all these are analogies between the Buddhists 
and ourselves." 

The analytical methods of comparative mythol- 
ogy have since been applied to the study of the 
Buddhistic scriptures and the writings of the early 
Gnostics ; and, considering the results of that com- 
parison, it can no longer be doubted that Schopen- 
hauer's conjecture* will soon become an estab- 
lished fact; namely, that the Prophet of Nazareth 
was a Buddhistic emissary, and preached his gospel 
in the name of Buddha Sakyamuni. Myths have a 
curious metamorphic tendency. In a large num- 
ber of indubitable instances, the sayings, doings, 
and adventures of legendary heroes (or myth- 
shrouded historical personages) have been attrib- 
uted to representative men of a later period : the 
exploits of a Persian archer, first to a Danish 
soldier, and afterward to a Swiss patriot ; the dicta 
of Zoroaster, to several of his followers ; the attri- 
butes of the old Wood-god, Woden, to Barbarossa, 
the entranced cave-dweller of the Kyfhauser; the 
adventures of the Indian Dawn-Spirits, to the 
heroes of Troy. 

By a similar metastasis of myths, the traditions 
of the old Hindu Krishna legend were transferred, 

*"I cannot get rid of the idea that the Christian creed 
will yet be traced to a Buddhistic source." — Die Welt als 
Wille, Vol. II., p. 716. 



BUDDHA AND HIS GALILEAN SUCCESSOR. 29 

first to the founder of Buddhism, and afterward to 
the person of his western apostle. Krishna, like 
Buddha, was a parthenogenitus, a virgin-son. 
Krishna was crucified; and the sculptured Pan- 
theon of Brahmanism includes the image of a vir- 
gin, called the "Queen of Heaven," holding an in- 
fant and cross in her arms. Krishna, like Buddha, 
astonished his teachers by his precocious wisdom. 
Both were born with a fully developed power of 
speech. According to the "Gospel of the Infancy" 
(attributed to St. Thomas), Maria holds a conver- 
sation with her new-born son, who informs her of 
his origin and his divine mission. The name of 
her Buddhistic prototype was Maja. Both Krishna 
and Buddha were of royal descent. A chorus of 
celestial singers celebrated the moment of their 
birth. The ruler of Krishna's birthland is fright- 
ened by a prophecy, and resolves the death of the 
infant. The boy's parents save his life by a timely 
flight, and conceal him for several years. The 
baffled despot commands the massacre of all male 
children of his kingdom. The "Gospel of the In- 
fancy" relates the miraculous achievements of the 
Christ-child, his combats with serpents and drag- 
ons, the fate of persons who insult him and are 
stricken dead, a council of young boys who choose 
him as their king. The boy Krishna, according to 
the Bhagavat Purana, subdues a fiery serpent, 
strikes dead persons who insulted him, and in his 
plays with other boys is chosen as their king. 
Krishna, like Buddha, had twelve favorite disciples 
who accompanied him on his missionary travels. 
Krishna, like Buddha, is tempted in the wilder- 



30 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

ness by the devil, rejects all proposals, and rejoices 
with a host of ministering angels. 

In the constellation of the Pleiades, six larger 
and forty or fifty smaller stars are crowded together 
within a space that could be enclosed by the appar- 
ent circumference of the moon. Either these stars 
form a correlative system, or their aggregation in 
the field of our vision, as well as the nearly uni- 
form size of the larger ones, must be ascribed to 
the strangest kind of coincidence ; and the astron- 
omer Olbers calculates that the probability of the 
former hypothesis exceeds that of the latter about 
twenty-five million times. With a similar degree 
of assurance, the student of the Hindu scriptures 
must reject the belief in the accidental analogies 
of the above-named traditions ; and an equally 
untenable theory is the conjecture of the Jesuit 
missionaries, that the Buddhists derived their le- 
gends from the Christian sect of the Nestorian 
heretics. We might as well be asked to believe 
that Homer borrowed his epic from the Iliad of 
Alexander Pope. 

Together with the unmistakable* doctrine of 
Buddha Sakyamuni, the prophet of Galilee prob- 

*Even in the modified form of the canonized Gospels. 
But, besides, there is no doubt that the Church eliminated 
a large number of unpractical dogmas. Nine-tenths of the 
early '"heretics" were too literal Buddhists to suit the pur- 
pose of the shrewd and compromising hierarchs. The 
Encratites abstained from wine, animal food, and marriage. 
The Marcionites denounced all "woridliuess," — the pursuit 
of wealth, office-holding, fine houses, and clothes, etc. The 
Montanists tried to purify their souls by fasting and long 
vigils, and often took a "vow of solitude," like the Cinga- 
lese Buddhists, and retired for years to the lonely high- 
lands of the Phrygian Moxintains. The Valentinians prac- 
tised communism, and subjected their novices to all sorts of 
ascetic ordeals. The Cassianites professed doctrines which 
resembled those of the modern <' Shakers." 



BUDDHA AND HIS GALILEAN SUCCESSOR. 31 

ably disseminated the current tradition about the 
miracles and adventures of his master ; and, when 
in the oral traditions of the next century the rec- 
ords of Buddha and Christ had coalesced, the East 
Indian legend was transferred to the soil of Pales- 
tine, while the myth-making faculty of the monastic 
historians supplied the details of the local coloring. 
The history of Krishna fades in the cloudland 
of primeval traditions, and seems to be largely 
blended with astronomical myths. The historical 
existence of Buddha Sakyamuni, on the other 
hand, can hardly be doubted, nor that of his glow- 
ingly eloquent ^-Test- Asiatic apostle. The records 
of the earlier Gospels are too fragmentary and con- 
tradictory to reconstruct a trustworthy biography 
of the Galilean Baddhist, but his system of ethics 
proves that it was the main object of his mission 
to graft the doctrine of Bnddha upon the optimistic 
theism of the Hebrew law-giver. Hence, the dog- 
matical contradictions of the Old and New Testa- 
ments ; the prominence assigned to the (ante-Mo- 
saic) paradise legend,* the penitential psalms, and 

In refuting these heretics, it is curious to notice how 
Clemens Alexandrinus uniformly appeals to the Old Testa- 
ment, and quietly ignores the precepts of the ascetic ap- 
pendix. The third hook of the Stromata is a perfect reduc- 
tio ad absurdum of Christian pessimism, which, neverthe- 
less, gained ground wherever the belief in the new revela- 
tion was sincere enough to turn theory into practice. 

*"The essence of the Christian religion is the centre 
dogma of Buddhism, — the doctrine of the worth! essness of 
terrestrial life. With this difference only, that Christianity 
dates that worthlessness from the transgression of oar 
apple-eating forefathers. This modification implied the 
fiction of a liberi arbitrii indifferentiae ; but it was re- 
quired by the necessity of grafting the doctrine of Buddha 
upon the mythological dogmas of Judaism. The myth of 
the Fall offered here the only basis for the insertion of the 
scion from the East Indian parent-tree."— Schopenhauer, 
Die Welt als Wille, Vol. II., p. 694. 



32 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

all passages that could be made to assume a pes- 
simistic significance ; the open rejection of the 
Mosaic health-code (as absolutely irreconcilable 
with the gospel of anti-naturalism), the sophistry 
of the Patristic writings, and the forced interpre- 
tations of the Hebrew prophecies. Hence, also, 
the old but ever new controversy of the Pelagians 
and Gnostics, the former leaning toward the ra- 
tional, manly, and realistic part, the other toward 
the mystical, pessimistic, and puling part of our 
heterogeneous Scriptures. 

Like the votaries of Zoroaster, the Hebrew Uni- 
tarians preserved the purity of their religion ; but 
the seed of the East Indian upas-tree did not 
perish. In the superstition-loaded atmosphere of 
Egypt and the effete vice-centres of Asia Minor, it 
found a more congenial climate, where it flourished, 
and finally betrayed its origin by bearing fruits 
after its kind, though its roots are still encrusted 
with the soil of the land that rejected it. 

Note.— FicZe Appendix, Indian Sources of the New Testa- 
ment and Concordance of Christianity and Buddhism. 



CHAPTER III. 

THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 

"Untruth should be exposed, whether its teachers come 
in the name of God or of the devil." — Vlrich Hutten. 

In the code of ethical principles which the 
world uses to judge the merits of a social reformer, 
it has long been recognized as a truism that "the 
end does not justify the means." But we are apt 
to overlook the equally cogent maxim that the 
means do not justify the end. The unkempt 
republican, who with fire and sword preaches the 
earth-redeeming gospel of liberty and equality, is 
denounced as an enemy of the human race ; while 
the bland, well-combed, and unctuous Jesuit is 
revered as a saint, though he labors to perpetuate 
a superstition that has turned the better half of 
this earth into a desert, and arrested the progress 
of the human race for fourteen hundred years. 
Our short-sightedness prevents us from tracing the 
connection of cause and effect in the fury of the 
purifying storm and the soft summer winds of the 
malarious fens. We shudder at the rage of the gale, 
and admire the beauty of the poisonous swamp- 
flower. 

To the nations of the Caucasian race, the genius 
of salvation did twice appear in a storm-cloud, the 
lures of the tempter came in a small, still voice. 
The sound of that voice was first heard on the banks 



34 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

of the Ganges, and filled the lands of the East till 
its echo seduced the poor fishermen on the banks of 
the Jordan. The keystone dogma of the Christian 
ethics is the anti-physical principle of Buddhism : 
whatever is natural is wrong. The mission of the 
Galilean ascetic, like the gospel of Buddha Sakya- 
muni, was a declaration of war against nature. 
According to the doctrine of Pessimism, our 
natural instincts are our natural enemies ; life is a 
disease, and death its only cure; the pursuit of 
earthly happiness is a chimera, and enjoyment in 
all its forms only serves to strengthen the fatal 
delusion; emancipation from the bondage of life 
is the summum bonum, and can be attained only by 
mortifying our natural desires. 

The instinctive love of joy is wrong : the path of 
self-affliction is the road to salvation. "If any man 
will come after me, let him deny himself, and 
take up his cross daily." "Blessed are they that 
mourn." "Be afflicted and mourn and weep; let 
your laughter be turned to mourning, and your joy 
to heaviness." "Woe unto you that laugh, for 
you shall mourn and weep." 

Our natural affections should be suppressed. 
"If any man come to me and hate not his father 
and mother, and wife and children, and brothers 
and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot 
be my disciple." 

The love of health is wrong: the body is the 
enemy of the spirit, and does not deserve our care. 
"Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat 
or what ye shall drink, nor yet for your body, 
what ye shall put on." "Bodily exercise profiteth 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 35 

but little." "There is nothing from without a 
man that, entering him, can defile him." 

The pursuit of natural science is wrong ; doubt 
and free inquiry are sinful; submissive faith is 
the gate to heaven. "Blessed are they that have 
not seen, and yet have believed." "He that believ- 
eth in me hath everlasting life, and shall not come 
into condemnation." "If any man love not the 
Lord Jesus Christ, let him be Anathema Marana- 
tha." "If an angel from heaven preach any other 
gospel unto you than that which we have 
preached, let him be accursed." "He that believ- 
eth on me is not condemned, but he that believeth 
not is condemned already, because he does not 
believe in the name of the only begotten Son of 
God." "If a man abide not in me, he is cast forth 
as a branch, and is withered ; and men gather them 
and cast them into the fire, and they are burned." 
" He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, 
but he that believeth not shall be damned." 

The trust in secular remedies is wrong : diseases 
can be cured by faith. "Receive thy sight, thy 
faith hath saved thee." "If any man is sick 
among you, let him call for the elders of the 
church, and let them pray over him, anointing him 
with oil in the name of the Lord." "And the 
prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord 
shall raise him up." "And, when he had called 
unto him his twelve disciples, he gave them power 
against unclean spirits to cast them out, and to 
heal all manner of sickness and all manner of 
disease." 

The natural instinct of resistance to injustice 



36 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

is wrong. "Resist not evil, but whosoever shall 
smite thee on the right cheek turn to him the 
other also. ... If any man will sue thee at the law 
and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak 
also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a 
mile, go with him twain." "Of him that taketh 
away thy goods ask him not again." 

The spirit-fancies of the nature-loving nations 
are wrong. The wilderness swarms, not with 
harmless fairies, but with malevolent demons. 
"And the unclean spirit goeth, and taketh with 
himself seven other spirits more wicked than, him- 
self." "I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven. 
. . . And all the devils besought him, saying, Send 
us into the swine, that we may enter into them." 
"And the devil took him up into the holy city, and 
setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple." "They 
brought unto him many that were possessed with 
devils." 

The belief in the peace of the grave is errone- 
ous. For the great plurality of the human race, 
the end of life is the beginning of endless and hor- 
rible tortures. "Wide is the gate and broad is the 
way that leadeth to destruction, and many there 
be which go in thereat ; and strait is the gate and 
narrow is the way which leadeth unto life, and few 
there be that find it." "The children of the king- 
dom shall be cast out into utter darkness, there 
shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth." "They 
shall be cast into the furnace of fire, there shall be 
wailing and gnashing of teeth." " They shall be 
tormented with fire and brimstone in the presence 
of the holy angels and in the presence of the 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 37 

Lamb." "And the smoke of their torment ascend- 
eth forever and ever, and they have no rest day 
nor night." 

The love of industry is wrong. A true believer 
shall not seek to supply his wants by earthly 
means, but rely on prayer and supernatural aid : 
"Take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? 
what shall we drink? or wherewithal shall we be 
clothed ? For after all these things do the Gentiles 
seek." "Take no thought of the morrow, for the 
morrow shall take thought for the things of itself." 
"Ask, and it shall be given you." "If ye have 
faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto 
this mountain. Remove hence to yonder place, and 
it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible 
unto you." 

These dogmas were propagated with the zeal 
and with the disinterestedness of the purest moral 
enthusiasm ; and yet there is no doubt that they 
have caused the human race more woe than all 
wars, all plagues, all famines, all poisons, and con- 
tagious diseases, and the rage of all the hostile 
elements of nature taken together : for it can be 
demonstrated with the utmost certainty of histori- 
cal evidence that the darkness of the Middle Ages, 
and the horrors and the misery of that terrible 
night, were the direct consequences of the faith 
which attempted to practise the precepts of the 
New Testament, and that the repressed instincts 
of our better nature burst their dam when the 
faith of the Middle Ages dissolved into scepticism 
and the conventional assent that stops short of 
practice. 



38 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

The worship-of-sorrow dogma led to the self 
torturing insanities of mediseval monachism. If 
physical pleasures are sinful and our physical in- 
stincts an impediment to our spiritual welfare, the 
seekers after salvation naturally concluded that 
the body must be treated like a wild beast, caged 
in monasteries and hermitages, and subdued by 
fasting, vigils, and all kinds of self-afSictions.* 
Hence, Anchorites, Flagellants, Celibates, Trap- 
pists, Puritans, Sabbatarians, and Shakers. 

True friendship was unknown while the de- 
nunciator of natural affection passed for a divine 
revelator. "He that hateth not his father and 
brother," etc., "cannot be my disciple." "For if 
ye love those who love you, what reward have 
you?" Hence, the zeal of the wretched bigots who 
delivered up their friends to the knife of the Holy 
Inquisition, and exulted in the suppression of their 
better instincts. 

The repudiation of the Mosaic health code and 
the pagan culture of the manly powers led to the 
physical degeneration of two-thirds of the noblest 
Caucasian races. If the body is the enemy of the 
spirit, the promotion of its welfare would be a 
sheer waste of time, or even a crime against our 
higher and eternal interests. Hence, the neglect 
of physical education, the gluttony, the besotted- 
ness, and the crimes against nature in which the 
seed-plots of monachism vied with the vice-centres 

*"If any sect," says Ludwig Borne, "should ever take it 
into their heads to worship the devil in his distinctive 
qualities, and devote themselves to the promotion of hu- 
man misery in all its forms, the catechism of such a relig- 
ion could be found ready-made in the code of several mon- 
astic colleges." 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 39 

of the decaying Roman Empire,* the general neg- 
lect of sanitary precautious, which shortened the 
average longevity of mediaeval Europe by fourteen 
or fifteen years. 

The faith-cure dogma is the root of mediaeval 
miracle-mongery. If diseases could be averted by 
prayer, medical science and sanitary precautions 
were equally superfluous. Lazy faith was easier 
than rational research, and the belief in the efficacy 
of exorcism enabled the Church to share the emol- 
uments without the labors of secular science. 
Hence, Loretto chapels, Lourdes water, processions, 
consecrated rosaries, and relic swindle. 

The propagandists of the Submission to Injus- 
tice dogma became the faithful ally of every form 
of despotism. The pagan pride in the majesty of 
self-reliant manhood was superseded by the wor- 
ship of abject self-abasement and self -distrust. If 
human nature was essentially evil, men were unfit 
for self government ; and their own welfare required 
the suppression of every revolt against the author- 
ity of the spiritual powers. Without the recogni- 
tion of human rights, without the principles of 
personal dignity and natural justice,! social order 

*"Quod enim Anno 1538, prudentissimus Rex Henricus 
Octavus cucullatorum coenobia, et sacrificorum collegia, 
votariorum, per venerabiles legum Docr.ores Tliomam 
Leum, Ricliardum Laytonum visitari fecerat, et tanto nu- 
mero reperti sunt apad eos scortatores, cinaedi, ganeones, 
pae icoues, puerarii, paederastae, Sodomitae, Ganimedes, 
ut in unoquoque eorum novam credideris Gomorrhaoi." 
Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 449. And the 
state of affairs in Southern Europe is attested by numer- 
ous unquotable passages in the memoirs of the Italian 
Guiccardi'i, the writings of the Spaniard Sanchez, and the 
indictment of Pope John XXII. 

t "Justice and equity wore foreign to that creed. Why 
should man try to be better than his God ? A God to whom 



40 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

became a legalized system of oppression, manliness, 
became a stigma, the love of freedom was denounced 
as a sign of an unregenerate heart. Hence, the na- 
tional degradation of so many Aryan nations, their 
sickening flunkeyism, their heartless subservience 
to the caprices of brutal despots. As Herbert Spen- 
cer demonstrates in his masterly resume of the dan- 
gers in the path of a progressive republic, a defiant 
resistance to every form of injustice and official 
despotism is the price of liberty, and that resist- 
ance is incompatible with the spirit of a system 
that inculcates the duty of self abasement as an 
article of faith. The pagan martyrs died for 
human rights, for personal freedom and national 
independence. The Christian martyrs died for a 
system of spiritual slavery. The Byzantine bigots 
who massacred each other in their competition for 
a lackeyship -at the court of the New Jerusalem 
could not defend their own city against domestic 
despots and foreign aggressors. 

they were taug:ht to ascribe a monstrous system of favor- 
itism: arbitrary grace for a few childreu of luck, and mill- 
ions foredooraed to eternal damnation."— i^'ewerftac/j/. 

"They attributed to the Creator acts of injustice and 
barbaritjr which it would be a,bsolutely impossible for the 
imagination to surpass, acts before which the most mon- 
strous excesses of human cruelty dwindle into insignifi- 
cance, acts which are, in fact, considerably worse than any 
that theologians have attributed to the devil."— iecA;?/. 

"It is said that the Bang of Morocco, Muley Ismael, has 
five hundred children. What would you say if a dervish of 
Mount Atlas related to you that the wise and good Muley 
Ismael, dining with his family, at the close of the repast, 
spoke thus: '1 am Muley Ismael, who have begotten you 
for my glory; for I am very glorious. I love you very ten- 
derly, I shelter you as a hen covers her chickens. I have 
decreed that one of my youngest children shall have the 
kingdom of Tafllet, and that another shall possess Morocco ; 
and for my other dear children, to the number of four hun- 
dred and ninety-eight, I order that one-half shall be tor- 
tured and the other burned, for I am the Lord Muley 
Ismael.' "—Voltaire. 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 41 

The fanatics who originated the dogmas of ex- 
clusive salvation by faith, and hell-fire as a punish- 
ment of unbelief, are responsible for the agonies 
of the three million human beings who perished in 
the flames of the stake. It is a libel against human 
nature to ascribe the barbarities of the Middle 
Ages to an innate love of cruelty ; and, in order to 
account for the numberless epidemic outbreaks of 
truculent fanaticism, the Christian apologists have 
to invent as many different theories as the mediaeval 
astronomers who attempted to reconcile their sys- 
tem with the apparently eccentric motions of the 
heavenly bodies. The hypothesis of Copernicus 
solved all those riddles, and a similar solvent of 
otherwise hopeless enigmas is the vainly disputed 
fact that the inhumanities of our Christian ances- 
tors were the inevitable consequences of a sincere 
belief in the dogmas of their monstrous creed. 
The most relentless butchers of the Holy Inquisi- 
tion were men of spotless personal morality. Many 
of the savage man-hunters of the Thirty Years' War 
were conspicuous for their clemency in private and 
domestic afcairs. ]N"either the Austrians nor the 
frugal Spaniards * are by nature a bloodthirsty 
race. But the dogma of exclusive salvation left 
them no choice. It made the suppression of un- 
belief a sacred duty ; for, if the propagation of er- 
roneous doctrines could doom thousands to an eter- 
nity of unspeakable, incomparable, and hopeless 
tortures, the objections founded upon such scruples 

* "Travellers are unanimous in declaring that in Spain an 
intense passion for the bulltight is quite compatible with 
the most active benevolence and the most amiable dispo- 
sition."— Zec/ci/. 



42 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

as compassion with the short sufferings of a con- 
demned heretic must have assumed an appearance 
of almost idiotic futility.* 

Hence, inquisitions and crusades, thirty years* 
wars, heretic-hunts, massacres of St. Bartholomew, 
expulsions of the Moors, and extermination of 
the Albigenses. Hence, also, that chief disgrace of 
our own age, — the cowardly hypocrisy which, like 
an all-pervading poison-vapor, taints the whole at- 
mosphere of our social life. "The fathers laid it 
down as a distinct proposition," says Lecky, "that 
pious frauds were justifiable and even laudable; 
and, if they had not laid this down, they would 
nevertheless have practised it as a necessary conse- 
quence of the doctrine of exclusive salvation. 
Paganism was to be combated; and, therefore, 
prophecies of Christ by Orpheus and the Sibyls 
were forged, lying wonders were multiplied, and 
ceaseless calumnies poured upon those who, like 
Julian, opposed the Church. That tendency tri- 
umphed wherever the supreme importance of these 
dogmas was held. Generation after generation, it 
became more universal : it continued till the very 
sense of truth and the very love of truth were 
blotted out from the minds of men." And this 
mode of thought has survived after the hot fanati- 
cism which engendered it has cooled down to 

* "Few persons, I think, can follow the history of Chris- 
tian persecution without a feeling of extreme astonishment 
that some modern writers, not content with maintaining 
that the doctrine of exclusive salvation ought not to have 
produced persecution, have ventured in defiance of the 
unanimous testimony of the theologians of so many centu- 
ries, to dispute the plain historical fact that it did produce 
it." — Lecky. 

"Haeretici non solum excommunicari sed juste occidi 
possunt."— r/iomas Aquinas, Summa, Vol. II., Art. III. 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 43 

frigid bigotry. The root of hypocrisy is the belief 
in the atoning efficacy of faith, or, faute de mieux, of 
conventional conformity. Our bigots sacrifice 
their conscience where their ancestors sacrificed 
their reason, and would be very sorry to admit 
the decadence of a creed that enables them to 
maintain the reputation of respectable principles 
by such easy means as connivance, cant, and 
mental prostitution. 

The Prayer vs. Labor dogma was a death-blow to 
industry and science. Rational agriculture was 
abandoned to the Moorish infidels.* Christians 
neglected their fields and sought to avert famine 
by prayer-meetings. The pursuit of natural sci- 
ence was regarded with suspicion. Inventors were 
denounced as magicians. Erudition was considered 
a prima facie evidence of unbelief. Scientific 
progress decreased with the increase of the belief 
in the efficacy of prayer. Hence, moral and physi- 
cal deserts; the desolation of the once fertile 
shores of the Mediterranean; a thousand years 
eclipse of common sensef and reason ; mendicants, 

*"The Spanish Christians considered agriculture beneath 
their dignity. In their judgment, war and religion were 
the only two avocations worthy of being followed. Some 
of the richest parts of "Valencia and Grenada were so neg- 
lected that means were wanting to feed even the scanty 
population remaining there. Whole districts were de- 
serted, and down to the present day have never been 
repeopled. All over Spain, the same destitution prevailed. 
That once rich and prosperous country was covered with a 
rabble of monks and clergy, whose insatiate rapacity 
absorbed the little wealth yet to be found. The fields were 
left uncultivated; vast multitudes died from want and 
exposure; entire villages were deserted."— £wcA;^e's HiS' 
tory of Civilization. 

tHow rational, sensible, and humane appear the writings 
of the pagan philosophers, in comparison with the ghastly 
nonsense of the monastic authors! In the freest cities of 
our most advanced countries, in Concord and Heidelberg, 



44: THE SECRET OP THE EAST. 

pious vagabonds, aad monastic drones ; blind hatred 
of progress, mysticism, supernaturalism, and con- 
tented ignorance. 

Has Christianity made us more moral ? A chorus 
of stall-fed obscurantists will denounce the impiety 
of the very question ; but the time is past when the 
shadow of the cross could veil a multitude of sins 
against truth, and with the help of God we will 
lift some of these veils. A fruitful source of ethi- 
cal delusions is the autodogmatic fallacy^ or the 
tendency of every sect to judge the merits of its 
founder by the standard of his own dogmas. The 
votaries of barbarous creeds award the highest 
prize of virtue to deeds of relentless ferocity. 
They mistake pity for weakness, and its suppres- 
sion for an act of praiseworthy heroism. The 
followers of Confucius inculcate the punctilious 
observance of ceremonies ; and, tried by that stand- 
ard, the Chinese moralist was undoubtedly the 
most perfect man. The worship of sorrow has so 
perverted our moral ideals that for long centuries 
joylessness and self -affliction ranked among the 
highest virtues. A jaundiced, whining abstainer 
from physical enjoyments was the Puritan paragon 
of moral perfection.* The municipal codes of 

an ancient Athenian would feel almost at home, a modern 
Unitarian would hail Job as a man and brother; but a 
resuscitated priest of the Middle Ages would walk our 
streets like a spectre defying the morning sun. 

* '*Ac.!ording to this code, all the natural affections, all 
social pleasures, all amusements, and all the joyous in- 
stincts of the human heart were sinful. The clergy looked 
on all comforts as sinful in themselves, merely because they 
were comforts. The great object of life was to be in a 
st^te of constant affliction. Whatever pleased the senses 
was to be suspected. It mattered not what a man liked: 
the mere fact of his liking it made it sinful. Whatever 
was natural was wrong." 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHKISTIAN RELIGION. 45 

many American cities still contain provisions for 
the suppression of public amusements on the only 
day on which a large plurality of our workingmen 
find their only leisure for recreation. The old 
Egyptians turned their funerals into holidays. 
"We celebrate our holidays like funerals. Sublu- 
nary life, according to a still prevalent theory, is 
a state of probation for testing a man's power of 
self-denial. God is supposed to delight in the self- 
abasement and mortification of his creatures. A 
"man of sorrows" is our ideal of moral perfection. 
The cross, an instrument of torture, is the symbol 
of our creed. That creed has made our daily life 
so joyless that the mere prospect of a change 
must, indeed, enhance the attractions of a future 
existence. 

We have been taught to treat the body as an 
enemy of the soul; and, if bodily health is an 
obstacle to true saintliness, we have evidently 
progressed in the path of salvation. Under the 
influence of a sixteen hundred years' reign of Anti- 
naturalism, the degeneration of the South-Euro- 
pean races has reached that degree where terrestrial 
existence ceases to be a blessing, and where the 

"Bathing, being wholesome as well as pleasant, was a 
particularly grievous offence; and no man could be allowed 
to swim on Sunday. It was, in fact, doubtful whether 
swimming was lawful for a Christian at any time, even on 
week-days; and it was certain that God had on one occa- 
sion shown his disapproval by taking away the life of a boy 
while he was indulging in that carnal practice. . . . Even on 
week-days, those who were imbued with religious princi- 
ples hardly ever smiled, but sighed, groaned, and wept. 
One pious elder had acquired distinction by his faculty for 
what was termed 'a holy groan.' He used to weep much in 
prayer and preaching; he was every way 'most savory.' 
Even among young children, from eight 5 ears old upward, 
toys and games were bad, and it was a good sign when 
they were discarded."— -Swc/cZe's History of Civilization. 



46 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

undue love of life is not apt to prevent the appre- 
ciation of spiritual comforts. 

We have been taught that faith — i.e., mental 
prostitution — is a prime condition of eternal wel- 
fare, and in many countries that virtue has been so 
earnestly cultivated that, if spiritual poverty is 
bliss, the kingdom of heaven cannot be far off. 

After the measure of such standards, the Gospel 
of Pessimism has certainly regenerated the human 
race. But the virtue of a merchant should not be 
weighed on his own balance. The merits of a 
creed cannot be proved by its conformity to its 
own precepts. The standards we should apply are 
the laws of nature, the revelations of science, and 
the lessons of history. Such tests would teach us 
that the love of gloom is a mental disease ; that, in 
a state of nature, every normal function is con- 
nected with a pleasurable sensation ; that happi- 
ness, therefore, is the normal condition of every 
living creature ; that to enjoy is to obey ; and that 
he who deprives himself or his child of any inno- 
cent pleasure commits a crime against nature. 
They would teach us that physical vigor is a prime 
condition of moral health, and that he who neglects 
the health-laws of nature sins against his soul as 
well as against his body.* They would teach us 
that light is the harbinger of happiness, that the 

* "When life has been duly rationalized by science, it will 
be seen that, among a man's duties, care of the body is im- 
perative, not only out of regard for personal welfare, but 
also out of regard for descendants. His constitution will 
be considered as an entailed estate, which ought to pass on 
uninjured, if not improved, to those who follow; and it will 
be held that millions bequeathed by him will not compen- 
sate for feeble health and decreased ability to enjoy life."— 
Herbert Spencer. 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 47 

sun of science has ripened more blessings in a 
single year than the moonshine of mysticism in 
eighteen centuries, that the suppression of free 
inquiry has never benefited any country, and that 
faith without reason is not a virtue, but a vice. 
They would teach us that the love of earth was 
the gospel of all progressive nations, that the love 
of life lends wings to every valiant enterprise, that 
the love of joy is the parent of every healthy in- 
stinct, while the worship of sorrow has never pro- 
duced anything but monsters and chimeras. They 
would teach us that pessimism is a blasphemy 
against the Author of life, against the Power whose 
all-sustaining hands furnish the weapons of its 
very assailants, — an insane, impious, and suicidal 
rebellion against our All-mother Nature, a foe to 
happiness, and the antithesis of all true religion. 

The doctrines of the Galilean Buddhist have bur- 
dened the record of human misery with thousands 
of devastating wars. Have they ever added one'\ 
millet-seed to the sum of human happiness ? Did 
the apostle of Nazareth ever speak one word in | 
favor of industry, of rational education, the cause 
of health, the love and study of nature, of physi- 
cal and intellectual culture? Not one. Has he ; \ 
promoted our progress in the paths of science and i . ^ 
freedom? Not one step. The phantasms of his "^ , ^' 
sickly anti-naturalism have made the world neither 
better nor wiser. His doctrine in all its tendencies 
is wholly unearthly, and therefore wholly unavail- 
able for any secular purpose. 

In what respect, then, has the human race been 
benefited by a creed that has perverted their ethi- 



48 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

cal instincts and systematically opposed the devel- 
opment of their physical and intellectual faculties ? 
"In the Duty of Disinterestedness," we are told, 
"Christianity has revealed a higher type of virtue." 
A new type would be more correct, if the study of 
the Buddhistic Scriptures had not revealed the true 
author of that doctrine. But we should not forget 
that the self-denial of the New Testament is not the 
disinterestedness of liberality, not the unselfishness 
of friendship or patriotism, but the self-abnegation of 
pessimism^ the indifference to the weal or woe of 
life which inspires the Buddhistic renunciation of 
worldly possessions. On the shores of the Medi- 
terranean, that disinterestedness has sadly reduced 
the interests of real estate, and made mundane life 
extremely uninteresting. A joy-loving cultivator 
of the smallest farm, who improves his land and his 
trees and surrounds himself with a troop of happy 
children, benefits the world more than a whole con- 
vent full of disinterested Buddhists with their 
ascetic crotchets and puling pessimism. 

Has Christianity made us more religious ? Its 
terrorism once covered the land with churches, and 
the steeples of those churches still bristle in every 
city ; but religion — i.e., a whole-souled moral enthu- 
siasm — requires the co-operation of heads and 
hearts, and is as different from medisBval devil- 
panics as from the stock-list-consulting sanctimony 
of our Sabbatarian Pecksniffs. Whether as brain- 
less bigots or as heartless hypocrites, the defenders 
of the Trinitarian dogma have always been the 
worst enemies of natural religion. Even a moral 
atheist would object to the absurdities and atroci- 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION. 49 

ties they ascribe to the Supreme Being, but there 
are no real atheists. Naturalism, Pantheism, and 
Theism are only different names for the recogni- 
tion of the beneficence and omnipresence of the 
great unseen Power ; and, to every sincere worship- 
per of that Power, the apotheosis of Nature's enemy 
must be a shocking blasphemy against her God. 

Has the Reformation improved our moral status ? 
would be a very different question ; for that reform, 
without admitting, and perhaps without suspecting, 
its ultimate mission, has proved itself a rather pro- 
gressive one, — so much, indeed, that the doctrine 
preached from the pulpits of our Protestant 
churches is not Christianity, but an eclectic Bible 
doctrine, mixed with at least fifty per cent, of 
purely pagan ethics. Outside of La Trappe, few 
human beings could nowadays allege a reason for 
calling themselves Christians, and an honest repug- 
nance to a solecism of that sort has perhaps evolved 
th e nomenclature of our countless isms. Most Meth- 
odists know that some of Wesley's doctrines are al- 
ready out of date ; few Calvinists would like to men- 
tion certain tenets of the Geneva witch-hunter ; and 
neither Catholics nor Old Kirk Presbyterians can 
doubt that the unqualified dogmas of the New Tes- 
tament would circumscribe the sphere of a modern 
apostle by limiting his influence to the audience of 
a lunatic asylum. 

The viands served in the refectory of our spirit- 
ual purveyors are half pagan and one-fourth He- 
braic, but the Buddhistic flavor of the remaining 
fourth greatly impairs the digestibility of their col- 
lation. Their temperance-precepts are neutralized 



50 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

by the doctrine of the man who depreciated the 
health-code of the Mosaic dispensation, who denied 
the defiling influence of "anything that enters the 
mouth," and who once proved his sincere indiffer- 
ence to the physical welfare of his fellow-men by 
manufacturing a considerable quantity of intoxicat- 
ing drink. The worship of God in the wonders of 
his visible creation is counteracted by the impious 
tenets of Anti-naturalism, the "vale of tears'* 
dogma, the alleged worthlessness of earthly life, 
that fills convents and prebendaries with the whin- 
ing gluttons who 

"With senseless, base ingratitude 
Cram, and blaspheme their feeder." 

The worship of Nature in her progressive reve- 
lations, and the regenerative influence of science, 
are paralyzed by the dogmas of natural depravity 
and salvation by faith; and every champion of 
human rights has to contend with the rancorous 
opposition of the creed that inculcates the duty of 
self-abasement. 

Protestantism has already eliminated three-fourths 
of the pessimistic elements in our eclectic system 
of ethics ; and, even in the interest of religion, it 
ought to complete its task. We cannot regain our 
moral health till we cease to consult the oracle of 
a life- hating fanatic and to disregard the teachings 
of our life-preserving instincts. Religion will ful- 
fil its mission when our Unitarians begin to deserve 
their name by renouncing the dogmas of the blas- 
phemous age when the offerings intended for the 
Temple of our God were carried to the house of a 
usurper. We must choose between Nature and 



THE ETHICS OF THE CHRISTIAN KELIGION. 51 

Anti-naturalism. The compromise plan has failed. 
If the Prophet of Galilee was a god, we must 
humbly recognize the fact that it has pleased the 
Supreme Being to contradict himself in his direct 
and indirect revelation. If he was a man, I hold 
that the blindness of his followers does not absolve 
us from the duty of exposing his baneful errors. 
Can good intentions outweigh the consequences of 
such errors ? If a quack kills my child with a poi- 
son which he honestly believed would cure it, I 
may forgive him because he meant to do me good 
instead of harm ; but should I revere him as a 
model physician, merely because his intentions 
were good ? And should the same reason entitle 
the Apostle of Anti-naturalism to be worshipped as 
a saviour ? The advocates of the compromise plan 
protest against the revelation of the whole truth, 
and hide their real motives behind a mask of chari- 
table forbearance ; but that mask has become 
threadbare, and to their protest I answer ; Truth 
needs no veil, and you would not hesitate to expose 
the delusions of your unfortunate fellow-men, if 
you did not desire their welfare less than you fear 
their prejudices. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE. 
"Consistency is the seal of truth." 

The alliance of Christianity and barbarism, and 
their joint triumph over the civilization of the 
Koman Empire, form the most fateful episode in 
the annals of the human race ; and in the book of 
history no other page is so stained with the sweat 
of laborious sophisms. To what complicated theo- 
ries of strange coincidences and peculiar mishaps 
the Christian apologists have to resort, in order to 
reconcile the alleged merits of their creed with the 
suspicious circumstances of its introduction and 
the monstrous consequences of its supremacy! 
Erom year to year, the progress of science has 
obliged them to modify their hypothesis by quali- 
fying its conclusions or falsifying its premises. 
But the evidence of history remains, and the only 
theory which can account for the persistent uni- 
formity of that evidence furnishes also the key to 
the equally persistent duplicity of the theorists 
who wish to approximate the truth of historical 
facts and yet dread to divulge the trade-secret of 
their creed. 

The Religion of Antinaturalism appealed to the 
pessimistic tendency of decrepitude, and thus recorri' 
mended itself to the instincts of a decrepit generation* 



THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE. 53 

During the first century of the Csesarean era, the 
silence of the pagan moralists, and their often al- 
leged blindness to the destiny of the new faith, 
admit of an equally simple explanation : they did 
not underrate the influence of the Galilean church, 
but they overrated the moral health of a nation 
which, in the incipience of its political abasement, 
seemed still justified in despising the contagion of 
a creed which even casual observers had recognized 
as an "execrable superstition." For the descent 
from Cato to Xero was really a mere trifle, com- 
pared with the fall from Nero to Constantino. 
The murderer of Seneca was the tyrant of a proud 
commonwealth, which sought and found means to 
shake off his yoke. The patron of Eusebius tyran- 
nized a community of submissive slaves, who had 
lost not only the blessings, but the instinct of lib- 
erty. The proud stoicism of the Eoman philoso- 
pher, the beauty-worship of the Roman poet, the 
joyous nature- worship of the Roman peasant, had 
all given way to the whining pessimism of the 
Galilean bigots, — to a creed which superadded the 
devil-panics of the Egyptian church to the asceti- 
cism of the nature-hating Buddhists. Tacitus 
misread the signs of his time. But let us put our- 
selves in his place. Even if the stars of our Re- 
public should be transferred to the crown of a 
despot, we might still feel ourselves entitled to de- 
spise the followers of an Oriental visionary who 
should deny the value of earthly possessions and 
the competence of human reason, but profess his 
belief in devils and witches ; who should denounce 
the observance of sanitary precautions, the prompt- 



54 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

ings of our natural affections, and the cultivation 
of industrial habits, and advise his disciples to 
supply their wants by prayer and miracle mongery. 
Even our Spiritualists, even the Cherokese wor- 
shippers of the Great Spirit, would be entitled to 
execrate the superstition of the bigots who should 
propagate such dogmas, and blaspheme their Crea- 
tor by co-ordinating his name with that of their 
mystagogue. 

Tacitus and Suetonius did not apprehend any 
danger from such sources ; but Oriental vices pre- 
pared the way for Oriental superstitions, and two 
hundred years later the countrymen of Scipio Af- 
ricanus had accepted the yoke of a creed which the 
countrymen of Judas Maccabseus rejected with 
persistent scorn. 

Worn-out sensualists consoled themselves with 
the hope of a better hereafter. Cowards pleased 
themselves in the idea of fulfilling the duty of 
meek submission to injustice and the "powers that 
be." Monastic drones denounced the worldliness of 
industrial enterprises. Physical indolence wel- 
comed the discovery that "bodily exercise profiteth 
but little." Envious impotence insisted on the 
duty of self-abasement. Transgressors against the 
health laws of nature relied upon the efficacy of 
the prayer-cure. Stall-fed priests sneered at the 
lean philosopher who wasted his time upon labori- 
ous inquiries, while he might wax fat on faith and 
the sacrifices of the pious. The demon-dogma was a 
godsend to the spiritual poverty of the elect. The 
so-called scholars of the Galilean church, who 
could not encounter the pagan philosophers on 



THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE. 55 

their own ground, found it very convenient to 
postulate a spook for every occult phenomenon. 

But moralists who clearly discern the change in 
the ethical standards of a nation are apt to overlook 
the progressiveness of that change. They see the 
present and the past, but not the future. In the 
game for moral supremacy, the pagan philosophers 
had all the good players on their side ; but the 
Christians, like the gods, played with loaded dice. 
Two rival crews struggled to row the Ship of State 
in opposite directions : Health, Manliness, Reason, 
Science, and Optimism arraigned against Disease, 
whining Bigotry, Unreason, Fanaticism, and Pessi- 
mism. But the Pessimists had the winds and tides 
in their favor. It was a struggle of declining phi- 
losophy against growing superstition. Before long, 
the imperial despots recognized their mistake in 
persecuting a creed which inculcated the duty of 
passive submission to oppressors, and the doom of 
Roman liberty was sealed when on its grave the 
despot Constantine erected the cross of the Gali- 
lean Buddhist. Claudius Constantine, the Roman 
Haynau, the man who added the cant of Uriah 
Heep to the crimes of a Cambyses, became the 
Pontifex Maximus of pessimism, and, in the view 
of his ecclesiastical biographers, atoned for all his 
murders by making Christianity the court-religion 
of the empire. The despotism which Nero and Ca- 
ligula had exercised under the influence of tempo- 
rary insanity, or in defiance of laws which they 
otherwise recognized, was then elaborated into a 
system. The last traces of the old democratic in- 
stitutions were utterly abolished. Where the poor- 



56 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

est plebeian of the ancient republic would have 
claimed a right, the proudest patrician had now to 
cringe for a favor. The Roman Padisha retired to 
Constantinople, and surrounded himself with an 
army of flunkeys and eunuchs. The visitors of 
the Audience Hall were required to perform the 
rite of genuflexion, and submit their petitions to 
the caprice of the autocrat. From the decrees of 
that caprice there was no appeal. The imperial 
saint compelled his father-in-law to hang himself. 
His brother-in-law was strangled in prison. His 
nephew, the only boy of a widow, had his throat 
cut. His eldest son was beheaded, and his wife 
was strangled in a bath. The will of the despot 
was officially recognized as the supreme law. Every 
symptom of political or religious independence was 
rigorously suppressed, and the alliance of Church 
and State bore its first-fruit in the decree which 
threatened the readers of Aryan books with capi- 
tal punishment, "/n hoc vinces." The cross had 
triumphed. 

There is an old Indian tradition that Ravan, the 
Prince of Darkness, avenged himself upon his con- 
querors by inviting them to a banquet of poisoned 
soma-vine. The myth of the Python and the le- 
gend of Hercules and Nessus are echoes of that 
tr&dition, and its meaning has been illustrated in 
the fate of many a barbarous nation that adopted 
the vices and superstitions of its conquered rival. 
The worshippers of sickly saints appealed in vaia 
to the old god of war ; and, a century after the 
death of Constantine, the hordes of the Sarmatian 
steppe dismembered the empire of the nation 



THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE. 57 

which, for centuries, had represented the highest 
mental and physical development of the human 
race. But the dying Centaur avenged himself by 
the bequest of a moral Nessus shirt. With the 
purple of the Csesars, the Gothic chieftains inher- 
ited the poison of the Galilean pest. 

Polytheistic savages are especially apt to conclude 
that their intellectual superiors must have a supe- 
rior fetich. A Yankee missionary once confessed 
that he won the confidence of a Fiji Islander by 
presenting him with a set of carpenters* tools, and 
describing the several implements as a Christian 
hatchet, a Christian claw-hammer, a Christian buck- 
saw. The barbarians of the North embraced the 
religion of the Roman god as they adopted the 
code of the Roman lawyer and the trappings of 
the Roman cavalry. When the savage conquerors 
returned to their native villages, they could hardly 
find room and names for the quantity and variety 
of their spoils, — purple, gold cloth, curious glass 
trinkets, ornamental shields, sweetmeats and in- 
cense, musical slaves, dancing-girls, soothsayers, 
monkeys, and parrots. To commodities of that 
sort, they had added a few bishops and crosses. 
They managed to acclimatize them, and quite en- 
joyed their novel acquisition. The poison had not 
yet revealed its virulence. A little while after, we 
find them involved in all the horrors of religious 
massacres, witch-riots, heretic^hunts, devil-panics, 
and manias of self-torture. The poison had be- 
gun to operate. 

The shadow of the cross began to creep over the 
face of the earth. The sun of pagan civilization 



58 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

still gilded the horizon with its last rays, but the 
foul birds of darkness were already on the wing ; 
and the spectres of superstition heralded the ad- 
vent of the dreadful night which for thirteen cen- 
turies was to blight and darken the fairest countries 
of the globe. It is a significant fact that the civil- 
ization of the East revived under the influence of 
the optimistic doctrines of Islam, while the civili- 
zation of the West was crushed by the ascendency 
of a pessimistic religion, and only revived at the 
decline of its influence. Two centuries after the 
conversion of Mecca, the sixteen provinces of the 
Caliph were studded with academies. Their cult- 
ure and prosperity rivalled the Golden Age of the 
Grecian republics ; and, six hundred years later, 
the Moors of Spain were still the teachers of Eu- 
rope in science and arts, as well as in industry and 
agriculture. Two centuries after the conversion of 
Rome, the sun of reason had set in a sea of in- 
sanity ; and that night was broken only by the 
dawn of modern rationalism. At the end of the 
fourteenth century, when the power of the Church 
had reached its zenith, not a single country in 
Europe had gained by its conversion from optimis- 
tic to pessimistic polytheism. Every school had 
been turned into a seed-plot of superstition, every 
jail into a grave of liberty ; the sword of Themis 
had become an instrument of spiritual despotism, 
literature a farrago of silly fables, science a sham ; 
the tillers of the soil were treated like wild beasts, 
thinkers and inventors as criminals ; the enemies 
of Nature were worshipped as the ministers of her 
God. 



THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE. 59 

The same Germans and Celts whom the Roman 
pagans had turned into intelligent citizens the 
Roman Christians turned into brutish bigots. At 
the same time, when Moorish Spain rivalled the 
god-gardens of ancient Italy, and every Moorish 
town had its schools of poetry and philosophy, 
Christian Spain was cursed with a chronic plague 
of mental and physical famines. With every pos- 
sible allowance for "unfortunate contingencies," 
" revivals of barbarism," " misunderstood doc- 
trines," etc., we cannot mistake the significance 
of the contrast. "Bring up a child in the way it 
should go, and it wiU not depart therefrom." And 
nations, too, are, on the whole, what their educa- 
tors make them. We need not expect that Pusey's 
"heaven sent gospel of regeneration" should turn 
every corner of earth into Eden; but, if it not 
only failed to alleviate, but always and under all 
circumstances was sure to aggravate, the misery, 
and intensify the vices of every converted nation, 
we can have no diflSculty in forming an opinion 
about the import of such facts. The laziest and 
sickliest Sybarites of ancient Italy would have ex- 
ecrated the systematic health ruin of the Italian 
monks, who boasted of disease and forced their 
disciples to treat the body as the enemy of the 
soul. The Alexandrian Platonists, with all their 
penchant for gnostic phantasms, would have loathed 
that mixture of superstition, insanity, and disgust- 
ing sophistry which the Alexandrian clergy dissem- 
inated as a divine revelation. The warriors of the 
old pagan Northland, with all their martial trucu- 
lence, would have shuddered at the mention of the 



60 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

inhumanities which their children perpetrated at 
the instigation of their priests. 

The first Galilean missionaries came in Unita- 
rian and optimistic disguises. Arius Alexandrinus 
was the patron-saint of the Visigoths, the Suevi, 
the Vandals, the Celt-Iberians, and the Burgun- 
dians. But moral epidemics can rarely be confined 
to their incipient stages, and there is a curious 
analogy between mental and physical poison habits. 
Harmless sweets always please. There is no reason 
why an octogenarian should not relish a cupful of 
strawberries as much as seventy years ago, when 
he picked them among the rocks of the mountain 
glens. Virgil's Eclogues never lose their charm. 
But the votaries of an unnatural stimulant must 
continually increase the dose : their tonic palls, the 
jaded nerves demand a stronger medium of stimu- 
lation. The alcohol-tippler has to advance from 
cider to brandy and rum. The opium-eater gradu- 
ates from laudanum to morphine. The victims of 
mental poison habits, too, prove that their vice is 
progressive. Visionaries advance from hobgob- 
lins to the personal devil. Buddha began with 
the deserts of Nepaul and ended with Nirvana. 
The asceticism of the Nazarenes led from celibacy 
to the Cross. All southern Arians ended by be- 
coming fanatical Trinitarians and persecutors 
of Arianism : the stronger poison prevailed ; mod- 
erate absurdity had no chance against absolute 
nonsense. Their missionary zeal, too, increased. 
From synods, it rose to riots, to heretic-hunts, to 
Jew-massacres, to civil wars, to international wars, 
and culminated in the inter-continental warfare of 



THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE. 61 

the Crusades. Intolerance advanced from excom- 
munications to excoriations, from the burning of 
heretical books to the burning of heretics. 

The progressiveness of every poison habit bears 
an exact proportion to the virulence of the poison. 
Johnsonian tea-drinkers are phenomenal. For one 
man who drinks coffee to an absurd excess, we 
shall find a thousand who swill wine or lager beer. 
The nature-worshipping Greeks repeated the harm- 
less myths and practised the merry rites of their 
creed for centuries without troubling themselves 
about the myths and rites of their neighbors. 
Their superstition differed from that of the Church 
as the inspired love of nature differs from the 
ecstatic fury of her enemies, as the day-dream of 
a happy child differs from the fever-dream of a 
gloomy fanatic. " Procul profani!" was the cry 
of the Eleusinian priests. They had more follow- 
ers than they wanted. Their joy-loving creed 
could dispense with autos-da-fd. The Hebrews, 
in stress of famine, conquered a little strip of ter- 
ritory between Arabia and the Syrian desert, and 
then tried their best to live in peace with heaven 
and earth, and their sects contented themselves 
with metaphorical rib-roastings. The Saracens 
spread their conquests from Spain to the Ganges, 
but their wars had a physical rather than meta- 
physical purpose. They needed land, and made a 
better use of it than the former occupants. They 
contented themselves with assessing dissenters, and 
did not think it necessary to assassinate them. 
But the Galilean pessimists could not afford to tol- 
erate an unconverted neighbor. To the enemies 



62 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

of nature, the happiness of an earth-loving, garden- 
planting, and science-promoting nation was an in- 
tolerable offence : reason had to be sacrificed to 
faith, health and happiness to the cross, and earth 
to heaven. Their conquests were generally unself- 
ish: they did not care for the lands of heathen- 
dom, they merely felt it their duty to suppress the 
impious prosperity of those who cultivated them. 
The Spanish Christians did not annex the property 
of their Moorish neighbors : they merely destroyed 
it. They did not covet the gardens of Andalusia : 
they merely wanted to extend the deserts of 
Aragon. "How hardly shall they that have riches 
enter the kingdom of heaven." It was the duty 
of a pious pauper to relieve his neighbors of such 
religious disabilities. "Blessed are they that mourn, 
for they shall be comforted." It was the duty of 
a pious pessimist to enlarge that basis of spirit- 
ual hopes. Year after year, Charlemagne left his 
Khineland palace to ravage the villages of the 
pagan Saxons, who betrayed an undue fondness 
for bear-hunts and field-sports, when they ought to 
have been at church, bemoaning their sins. When 
they declined to slave for his abbots and surrender 
their children to a band of gloomy fanatics with 
their unnatural dogmas and secret vices, he en- 
deavored to cure their stiffneckedness by behead- 
ing as many as he could catch. For a century and 
a half, the Spanish Unitarians were burned at the 
rate of two hundred a year. Jews and Moors 
were almost the only industrial inhabitants of the 
peninsula : their expulsion would paralyze agricult- 
ure, manufactures, science, commerce, and me- 



THE CONVERSION OF EUROPE. 63 

chanical arts ; but such trifles could not be allowed 
to outweigh the ghostly interests of the natives, 
and, at the expense of the national credit, and the 
irretrievable loss of national prestige, the subjects 
of the Most Christian Monarch were reduced to a 
proper state of financial and spiritual poverty. 
Between the outbreak of the first crusade and the 
final expulsion of the Andalusian Moors, more than 
fourteen million human lives were sacrificed to the 
propaganda of pessimism, and for seven centuries 
the neighbors of Christianized Europe were exposed 
to the almost continual horrors of a moral opium 
war. 

The monody of Libanius* was the dirge of 
pagan civilization. As soon as the light of philos- 
ophy had faded, the vampires of the Galilean 
church became aggressive, and for the next thou- 
sand years the moral history of Europe is the 
history of an unremitting war against Xature, a 
war which systematically promoted the survival of 
the unfit by making manliness a stigma and com- 
mon sense a capital crime. It is this anti-natural- 
ism that makes the study of mediaeval history such 
a sickening task. The moral atmosphere of the 
old pagan republics, even after the star of their 
fortune had declined, is pervaded by a spirit of 
mental and physical health ; while the air of the 
Christian Middle Ages reeks with the miasma 
of misery and superstition. 

Between the morning-light of pagan philosophy 
and the evening-light of modern science inter- 
vened a thousand years' eclipse of human reason, 

* On the death of the Emperor Julian, 363. 



64: THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

a millennium of madness and misery whicli but for 
that unnatural night might have been the happiest 
period in the history of mankind. The rule of the 
Cross robbed the Germanic nations of the spring- 
time of their national development. When they 
awakened from the morning-slumber of their 
political infancy, they found themselves in the 
coils of a strangling hydra ; and the prime of their 
strength, which might have won them the golden 
prizes of the international arena, had to be wasted 
in the struggle against the slimy monster that 
threatened to crush out their reason and their life. 
In that struggle for life and light, the Hercules of 
the Xorth finally prevailed ; but the Apollo of the 
South succumbed to the Python : the Mediter- 
ranean Paradise was forever lost. Here and there, 
the worshippers of the Light-god still wreathed 
his altars in happy ignorance of the impending 
change; but the shadows of Nirvana gathered 
fast, and fifty years after the death of Julian the 
day of the Juventus Mundi had faded into the 
night of the Middle Ages. There, the fragrance of 
a sunlit mountain-forest, resounding with the hun- 
ter's shout and the jubilee of happy children; 
here, the fumes and the groans of a Buddhistic 
opium-den. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE NIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 

"Your prayer for light shall be answered, if you consent 
to open your eyes."— (?. E. Lessing. 

Since the dawn of modern rationalism, the path 
of social reform has been obstructed by a Sphinx 
that still propounds her riddle to every philosopher, 
to every moralist, to every speculative historian. 
That Sphinx is the Christian religion; and the 
riddle, which has to be solved before we can clear 
the road of progress, is the enigma of the IVIiddle 
Ages. 

Whence that dreadful night that followed sud- 
denly and unnaturally upon the bright sunrise of 
pagan civilization? that long eclipse of reason, 
science, freedom, and happiness, that trance-like 
lethargy of the very nations which before and after 
gave the most decided proofs of their capacity for 
mental progress ? ^Vhat turned their health into 
a thousand years' disease ? Was it the influence of 
a supernatural religion? Then, how did the fol- 
lowers of other supernatural creeds happen to 
escape that doom ? For we should not forget that 
the morning-hour of our prosperous Age of Rea- 
son is but a moment compared with the long cen- 
turies of health and prosperity which the Greeks, 
the Spanish Moors, and the Eastern Saracens con- 
trived to combine with a firm belief in the reality 
of supernatural agencies. 



66 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

It would have been well for the nations of Eu- 
rope, if their priests had contented themselves with 
the inculcation of such beliefs. The misery of the 
Middle Ages was due not to the supernatural, but 
to the anti-natural, tendency of the Christian relig- 
ion. According to the gospel of the Galilean 
Buddhists, earth, with all its joys and desires, with 
all its visible and invisible habitants, is wholly 
evil ; the renunciation of temporal blessings is the 
first condition of eternal welfare, and death the 
only gate of true life. The Christians did not 
deny the existence of the pagan deities : they merely 
changed them into devils. The pagan Pantheon 
became a pandemonium. Rivers, woods, and moun- 
tains swarmed, not with harmless nymphs and 
dryads, but with tempting demons, emissaries of 
the brimstone-pit who devoted their superhuman 
powers to the seduction and affliction of Adam's 
progeny.* The gods and saints of Greece, Rome, 
and Palestine, descended from heaven to share the 
earthly joys of mortals, to bless and hallow the 
scenes of their earthly struggles and triumphs. 
The saints of Buddhism and Christianity visited 
earth to mar its joys, to depreciate its blessings, to 
wean its children from their natural instincts and 
sympathies. Has the worship of sorrow ever failed 

*Th8 belief in fairies was of Druidic origin, and was 
either suppressed or characteristically metamorphosed by 
the Church, who, true to her pessimistic principles, diabo- 
lized the Celtic and German as well as the Grecian dei- 
ties. Wodan, the hunter-god, became a Wild Huntsman; 
Hulda, a night-hag, the first May night, when Hertha 
awakens the slumbering wood-spirits, a Walpurgis-Nacht 
with its hellish revivals. Even objects of scenic interest, 
the trysting-places of the nature-worshipping Druids, be- 
came ♦'devils' pulpits," "devils' bridges," "devils' casties." 



THE NIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 67 

to darken the light of nature? Has it added one \ 
millet-seed to the sum of earthly happiness ? Did \ 
the Apostle of Galilee ever speak one word in favor \ 
of industry, rational education, the love and study 
of nature, physical and intellectual culture ? Not | i / 

one. Has his mission promoted our progress in .' A^ 

the paths of science and freedom ? Not one step. 
His doctrine in all its tendencies is wholly un- 
earthly, and therefore wholly unavailable for secu-y 
lar purposes. 

The pagan gods were the deified powers of Nat- 
ure, the patrons of mariners, shepherds, and hus- 
bandmen. The Christian gods were the deified 
enemies of Nature. Even the Christian Deus 
Maximus frowned on earthly pleasures, and could 
be propitiated only by the mortification of almost 
every natural instinct : the bounteous All-father 
had become an All-tormentor, a celestial grand- 
inquisitor, who demanded an implicit submission 
of human reason to inhuman dogmas, and doomed 
the vast plurality of his creatures to the tortures 
of an everlasting auto-da-fe. 

In the instinct of freedom, in the love of knowl- 
edge, and the sense of beauty, the Christian mor- 
alists, like the pagan philosophers, recognized the 
power of a mysterious inspiration, but with this 
difference, that the pagans ascribed that inspira- 
tion to the favor of a beneficent god, the Christians 
to the wiles of a tempting fiend. More than fifty 
generations of our Christian ancestors were taught 
to neglect the health laws of nature as unworthy 
the attention of a candidate for the higher blessings 
of the world to come. Eveiy opposition to the 



68 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

tyranny of the secular or spiritual authorities was 
punished as a revolt against the authority of a 
creed which inculcated the duty of passive submis- 
sion to injustice. The Holy Alliance of Church and 
State disdained to recognize the natural rights of 
men whose natural instincts were supposed to be 
wholly evil. In every progress of natural science, 
the guardians of an anti-natural creed scented a 
danger to the prerogatives of the holy brother- 
hood. Every philosopher, every mathematician, 
every naturalist, had to keep the secret of his dis- 
coveries, if he wished to keep his head. The night 
of the Middle Ages was not the natural blindness 
of unenlightened barbarians, but an unnatural 
darkness, maintained by an elaborate system of 
spiritual despotism, and in spite of the fierce strug- 
gles of many light-loving nations. 

In the French province of Languedoc alone, the 
man-hunters of the Holy Inquisition spilled more 
human blood than ever reddened the sand of the 
Eoman arena. "But the gladiators died to min- 
ister to a frivolous popular amusement," says the 
Jesuitical apologist, "while the mediaeval heretics 
were sacrificed to the interests of our revealed 
faith." A faith which would undoubtedly tempt 
you to renew the butcheries of your predecessors, 
if you could regain their power; but, after its 
doctrines have been recognized as a mixture of 
God-insulting idolatries, nature-insulting precepts, 
and reason-insulting superstitions, what remains 
to compensate the world for the lives of the twenty- 
five hundred thousand martyrs of reason and free- 
dom whose murder has undoubtedly debased the 



THE NIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 69 

mental type of the human race? Will sophistry 
dare to mention the elements of natural morality 
which are common to all religions, but which the 
anti-natural dogmas of Christianity crowded into 
the background ? Has religion gained by its asso- 
ciation with the doctrines of a Church that made 
it a synonyme of all that is odious and absurd ? 
Has the rule of that Church furthered the moral 
progress of the forty generations whose wisest, 
manliest, noblest, and bravest men were systemati- 
cally weeded out, to enforce the survival of idiots 
and hypocrites? For thirteen centuries, the rack, 
the stake, and the cross were leagued against nat- 
ure and mankind. 

It is true that here and there the genius of Hu- 
manity triumphed over its enemies ; it is true that 
the Christian obscurantiiits could not entirely sup- 
press the mental activity of the Caucasian race ; 
but it is equally true that their labors to suppress 
the fruits of that activity were successful enough 
to retard the progress of mankind for nearly four- 
teen hundred years. 

I am not disposed to deny the merits of the 
amiable inconsistencies of several Christian sects, 
such as the republican enthusiasm of the English 
Puritans, who found it convenient to forget the 
duty of passive submission to injustice ; or the tol- 
erance of several Catholic pontiffs in their zeal for 
the revival of pagan arts and sciences, — the same 
arts and sciences which their predecessors had 
labored to suppress; or the promotion of the 
cause of temperance by Protestant clergymen, who 
have at last awakened to a recognition of the fact 



70 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

that a man can be defiled by things that enter his 
mouth, and that the magician of Canaan set a 
bad example by turning drinking water into wine. 
I do not deny that some of the worst Christian 
hierarchies have done some good, in spite of their 
creed; but I maintain that, just as far as they 
have tried to conform to the precepts of that creed, 
they have proved themselves the worst enemies of 
mankind. 

"What !" cries my theological friend, "enemies of 
mankind f Have they deserved that epithet by 
their unselfish zeal in propagating a religion which 
inculcates such precepts as the duty of universal 
love?" 

And I reply : Yes, in just as far as they acted in 
the antinatural spirit of that religion. For how 
did it teach them to prove their "love" ? By mak- 
ing earth more lovely ? By making life more worth 
living? By increasing the creature comforts of 
their fellow-men? By teaching them to observe 
the health laws of God, to recognize the principles 
of rational education, the conditions of social 
progress? Not if they could help it. Whatever 
is natural is wrong, was the foundation dogma of 
their creed; and true believers tried to promote 
the welfare of their fellow-men by suppressing 
their freedom in the interests of "Christian disci- 
pline," their reason in the interests of "Christian 
revelation" ; by burning their bodies for the bene- 
fit of their souls, and by imprisoning their chil- 
dren in convents, where tyranny and superstition 
conspired for the suppression of every natural in- 
stinct. 



THE NIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 71 

The Arabs have a tradition that a roving Bed- 
ouin once discovered the earthly paradise, and was 
so haunted by the memory of its scenes and bird 
songs that he found the dreariness of his native 
deserts unendurable, and wandered to the seashore 
and drowned himself. And, if a resuscitated 
Roman could see what the rule of the Cross has 
made of his birthland, he, too, would probably 
take refuge with Charybdis rather than endure 
the hideous sight. The paradise of Southern Eu- 
rope could not be at once spoiled. Traces of the 
old nature worship still lingered here and there. 
The Apennines still sheltered the remnants of the 
sacred groves. A few mountain tribes still kept 
the foe at bay, and relied on the strength of their 
sinews rather than on prayers and miracles. But 
the efforts of the spoilers did not cease; and it 
may be doubted if the Caucasian race will ever 
wholly recover from the effects of a thousand 
years' attempt to lure their children from earth 
to ghostland, to poison their minds with the dog- 
mas of pessimism, to sacrifice the pagan Elysium 
to the Buddhistic Mrvana. How is it that "cli- 
matic influences" have not sapped the physical 
vigor of the Arabs, the Jews, the Berbers, the Per- 
sians, the East-Indian Mohammedans ? Only anti- 
natural religions have achieved that deep abase- 
ment of the physical type of our race which we 
see in China and Southern Europe. For we should 
not forget that the nations of Northern Europe 
saved themselves by the revolt of the Protestant 
Reformation, before the poison of pessimism had 
sapped their strength. The gods of Greece were 



72 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

the deified powers of Nature; Olympus was an 
earthly mountain ; the immortals were worshipped 
with songs and dances, and did not oblige their 
votaries to sacrifice their reason and their freedom. 
The doctrines of anti-naturalism, diabolism, and 
eternal punishment, were unknown to the expo- 
nents of the Mosaic dispensation. Nay, with the 
exception of that doubtful passage in Job, the 
Old Testament contains not a line, not a single 
word, thaf could be fairly construed into an allu- 
sion to the doctrine of a future existence. Its 
God rewards his servants with temporal blessings, 
its retributions are earthly retributions, its para- 
dise bloomed on this side of the grave. The na- 
tions of Islam believed in a supernatural paradise ; 
but its gates had to be won by valiant deeds, by 
wisdom and tempera ace, and not by whining self- 
abasement and the contempt of bodily health. 
But the dogmas of the Galilean Church were 
wholly anti-natural, and, in their strict accepta- 
tion, necessarily conducive to mental and physical 
bankruptcy. 

When the sceptre of Rome passed into the hands 
of the victorious Goths, Western Europe and the 
Mediterranean peninsulas were still in the prime of 
their fertility. Climate, soil, scenic grandeur, natu- 
ral facilities of communication, the happiest pro- 
portion of cultivated fields and forest laifds, — all 
contributed to make them the most favored regions 
of the Eastern Continent ; and we should remem- 
ber that the nations who inherited them were, in 
natural capacities, immeasurably superior to the 
best Arabian tribes. Among the sad ''It might 



THE NIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 73 

have beens" of the world's history, the saddest is 
the reflection what those countries might have 
become, if the noble Visigoths, the heroic Longo- 
bards, and the manful Saxons had been permitted 
to rule them, under the influence of a moderately 
rational religion, like that of Islam. The golden 
age of Hellas would have been eclipsed by nations 
who (as they proved, as soon as they could rid 
themselves of the Galilean incubus) combined 
the intellectual faculties of the Greeks with a 
warmer love of nature and a prouder love of per- 
sonal independence. 

At the end of the thirteenth century, the ene- 
mies of nature had reached the zenith of their 
power; and, at that time, it may be said that, 
without a single exception, the countries of Christian 
Europe were worse governed, more ignorant, more 
superstitious, poorer, and unhappier than the worst 
governed province of pagan Rome.* The "scion 

♦"Feudalism," says Blanqui, "was a concentration of all 
scourges. The peasant, stripped, of the inheritance of his 
fathers, became the property of ignorant, inflexible, indo- 
lent masters: he was obliged to travel fifty leagues with 
their carts, whenever they required it ; he labored for them 
three days in the week, and surrendered to them half the 
product of his earnings during the other three; without 
their consent, he could not change his residence or marry. 
And why, indeed, should he wish to marry, if he could 
scarcely save enough to maintain himself? The Abbot 
Alcuin had twenty thousand slaves, called serfs, who were 
forever attached to the soil. This is the great cause of the 
rapid depopulation observed in the Middle Ages, and of 
the prodigious multitude of monasteries which sprang up 
on every side. It was doubtless a relief to such miserable 
men to fled in the cloisters a retreat from oppression; but 
the human race never suffered a more cruel outrage, indus- 
try never received a wound better calculated to plunge the 
world again into the darkness -of the rudest antiquity. It 
suffices to say that the prediction of the approaching end 
of the world, industriously spread by the rapacious monks 
at this time, was received without terror." — R&swme de 
VHistoire du Commerce, p. 156. 



74 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

of the Buddhistic parent tree" had begun to bear 
fruit after its kind. The sway of the Cross ex- 
tended from the Baltic to the Hellespont ; the em- 
pire of the Church embraced every variety- of 
European climate, it embraced Greek, Latin, Ger- 
man, Slavic, and Celtic nations, — nations which it 
had received in every stage of civilization, semi- 
civilization, and barbarism, but whom the poison 
of its dogmas had affected with a uniform result.* 
Wherever we look, darkness, slavery, and misery ; 
bigoted tyrants and brutalized serfs, neglected 
fields, blighted cities, perverted sciences, and par- 
alyzed industries; hordes of self-torturing mani- 
acs frenzying the populace with their threats 
and prophecies ; international man-hunts, religious 
massacres, witchcraft riots, and a merciless war 
against every form of mental and social independ- 
ence. Peasants were treated like beasts of burden. 
If earthly pleasure was sinf al and heaven our proper 
home, Herr Baron and Monsieur I'Abbe saw no 
reason to provide creature comforts for their serfs. 

*Protestant Jesuits have tried to ascribe the cause of 
that result to the pagan admixtures of the Catholic creed. 
The seasons and rites of many Catholic holidays, they say, 
correspond to those of old Roman.f estivals ; the most pop- 
ular saints of the Catholic calendar were pagan demigods 
in disguise ; the legends of the early Church were cor- 
rupted with interpolations of Roman and Grecian myths. 
Corrupted forsooth ! The humanizing and naturalizing 
influence of pagan traditions alone saved the victims of 
the Galilean Church from mental inanition in the desert 
of asceticism : they were reduced to the alternative of the 
prince in Grimm's folk-sagas, who had to wed a peasant 
girl or a grinning death's-head. For analogous reasons, 
the English Puritans had to popularize their ghastly creed 
with an infusion of Hebrew elements : the names of their 
warlike saints, the shibboleths of their peculiar cant, the 
favorite texts of their field preachers, were nearly always 
borrowed from the Old Testament. But such palliatives 
served only to disguise the doctrine of pes-^imism, as 
poison-mongers administer their potions with pleasant 
condiments. 



THE NIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 75 

"One sees certain dark, livid, naked, sunburnt 
wild animals, male and female, scattered over the 
country and attached to the soil, which they root 
and turn over with indomitable perseverance. 
They have, as it were, an articulate voice; and, 
when they rise to their feet, they show a human 
face. They are, in fact, men : they creep at night 
into dens, where they live on black bread, water, 
and roots. They spare other men the labor of 
ploughing, sowing, and harvesting, and, therefore, 
deserve some small share of the bread they have 
grown. Yet they were the fortunate peasants, — 
those who had work and bread, — and they were 
then the few" (while two-thirds of the arable terri- 
tory of France were in the hands of the Church).* 

If truth was communicated from heaven by di- 
rect revelation, if diseases, famines, and droughts 
could be averted by prayer, why should men waste 
their time on science? "A cloud of ignorance," 
says Hallam, "overspread the whole face of the 
Church, hardly broken by a few glimmering lights 
who owe almost the whole of their distinction to 
the surrounding darkness. ... I cannot conceive 
of any state of society more adverse to the intel- 
lectual improvement of mankind than one which 
admitted no middle line between dissoluteness and 
fanatical mortifications. . . . No original writer of 
any merit arose ; and learning may be said to have 
languished in a region of twilight for the greater 
part of a thousand years. ... In 992, it was as- 
serted that scarcely a single person was to be 

*La Bruyfere. Quoted in P. L. Courier's Petition d la 
Chambre des Deputes, p. 19. 



76 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

found, in Rome itself, who knew the first elements 
of letters. Not one priest of a thousand in Spain, 
about the age of Charlemagne, could address a 
common letter of salutation to another." The 
history of every mediaeval philosopher, discoverer, 
or reformer is the history of a life-long struggle 
against the tyranny of a light-hating alliance of 
despots and bigots. 

The doctrine of "renunciation" made patriotism 
an idle dream : the saints whose "kingdom was 
not of this world" had no business with vanities of 
that sort ; no chieftain could trust his neighbors ; 
cities were pitted against cities, and castles against 
castles ; patriotic reformers would vainly have ap- 
pealed to the sympathies of men who had been 
taught to reserve their interest for the politics of 
the New Jerusalem. 

And what an age for the lovers of truth ! Where 
should they take refuge from their enemies, when 
every year the blood of free thinkers was poured 
out like water ? Where should they quench their 
thirst after knowledge? Among the Arabs, who 
would slay them as spies? In cities, where the 
next neighbor would betray them to the spies of 
the Holy Inquisition ? In convents, in the strong- 
holds of pessimism, where, year after year, they 
had to 

"Erwaclien mit Entsetzen Morgens auf , 

Den Tag zu sehen, der in seinem Lauf 

Nicht einen Wunsch gewahren wird, nicht einen!" 

— Awake with horror every morning, 

To see the day which in its course will not 

Grant the fulfilment of a single wish !— 



THE NIGHT OF THE MIDDLE AGES. 77 

But the deepest shade of the dreadful night 
darkened the path of natural religion. To him 
who seeks to know the will of the All-father by 
studying the laws of his universe, and honors his 
wisdom and beneficence by ordering his life in 
conformity with those laws, it must indeed have 
appeared as if our earth had been abandoned to 
the powers of darkness. For what fiends could 
have insulted the name of the Creator by grosser 
blasphemies than the maniacs who ascribed to him 
acts of such monstrous cruelty that the inhumani- 
ties of the worst earthly despots appeared mild in 
comparison, and who hoped to gain his favor by 
turning his paradise into a desert, by rejecting his 
gifts, by renouncing the blessings of his marvellous 
earth, and by sacrificing their freedom, their 
health, and their reason ! 

A year after the death of the prophetess Sos- 
pitra, says the pagan historian, Eunapius, her son 
was one day standing before the temple of Serapis, 
when the prophetic spirit of his mother fell upon 
him. "Woe be our children !" he exclaimed, when 
he awakened from his trance. "I see a cloud ap- 
proaching: a great darkness will fall upon the 
human race." 

That cloud did not come from Olympus or Sinai. 
The spectre of an earth-blighting disease stalked 
through the land ; and the time will come when, 
in the form of that spectre, all but the wilfully 
blind will recognize not the manful monotheism 
of Moses, not the mythology of the nature-loving 
Greeks, but the nature-hating pessimism of Buddha 
Sakyamuni. 



CHAPTER VI. 

AN EXPENSIVE CREED. 

"Insani fugiunt mundum, immundumque sequuntur." — 
Jordan Bruno. 

The most cherished dogma of the modern Jesuit 
is the belief that the conditions of our earthly 
happiness are influenced by the continual interfer- 
ence of preternatural agencies ; for he has to pos- 
tulate a continued miracle to explain the fact that 
the creed, which he calls the best of all possible 
religions, has been a constant source of misery and 
error. But, if the true reason of that fact has once 
been named, its concordance with the historical 
records of the last sixteen centuries will be a 
sufficient vindication of its correctness; for the 
-consistency of theory and experience may reach a 
degree that can defy the wiles of sophistry. 

From the first council of Nice to the last con- 
ference of the "Evangelical Alliance," the history 
of the Galilean Church has been the history of an 
unremitting war against nature; and the propa- 
ganda of her dogmas could prosper only at the 
expense of our earthly happiness. The direct 
results of that warfare would be amply sufficient 
to account for the fact that the Age of Faith, the 
era when the rule of the cross maintained its 
supremacy, was the dreariest period in the history 
of the human race; but, unhappily, those results 
were not confined to the suppression of harmless 



AN EXPENSIVE CREED. 7D 

amusements and scientific investigations. It is 
easier to pervert than to suppress a natural instinct. 
Wherever pessimism crushed the flowers of this 
earth, the soil began to teem with poisonous 
weeds. The suppression of healthful pastimes 
begat a passion for vicious pastimes, and made 
the fancied identity of sin and pleasure a sad 
reality. The Olympic games and the Capitoline 
festivals were abolished by the order of a Chris- 
tian emperor. The field-sports of the Gaelic peas- 
ants were suppressed by the influence of the 
Scotch clergy. The worship of sorrow spread its 
gloom over every emotion of the human heart. 
But, when the Church had succeeded in making 
life as dismal as the dogmas of her creed, her 
victims took refuge in secret sins and drunken- 
ness. Even the slaves of ancient Rome had their 
saturnalia, when their masters indulged them in 
the enjoyment of their accumulated arrears of hap- 
piness ; but our laborers toil like machines, whose 
best recreation is a temporary respite of work. 
Human hearts, however, will not renounce their 
birthright to happiness; and, if joy has departed 
this life, they pursue its shadow into the land of 
dreams, and try to spice the dry bread of daily 
drudgery with the sweets of delirium. 

The attempt to suppress the pursuit of natural 
sciences led to the pursuit of j9seMc?o-sciences, — to 
supernaturalism, demonism, and aU sorts of hid- 
eous chimeras. The attempt to suppress the wor- 
ship of nature led to the worship of unnatural- 
ism, the veneration of a whole almanac full of 
nature-hating, self -torturing maniacs.* The fanat- 



80 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

ical asceticism that begat callousness to personal 
sufferings led its victims to behold with indiffer- 
ence, and at last with delight, the sufferings of 
their fellow-men. The cruelties of the worst pagan 
despots were surpassed by the absolute inhumanity 
of pious Christian monks and priests. The sup- 
pression of the spirit of manful emulation that 
assembled the champions of the Olympic festivals 
forced that instinct to seek its gratification in 
cunning and treachery, in the sordid competition 
of hypocrites and sycophants. The suppression of 
rational freedom led to anarchy, to communism 
and nihilism. The ordinance of celibacy became 
the mother of secret vices. Intolerance is the 
parent of hypocrisy. 

Pessimism has been on trial for sixteen hundred 
years; and the history of the Middle Ages has 
taught us that man's divorce from his earthly 
instincts is the removal of a tree from its native 
soil, a removal from the basis of life. For sixteen 
centuries of faith and trust, our ancestors tried to 
reach heaven by abandoning their place in nature ; 
and we can now estimate the costs of the experi- 
ment. 

The dogmas of the Christian Church have cost 
the world three million square miles of lands, 
which once were the garden spots of this earth, 
but which have been turned into deserts by the 
neglect of rational agriculture and the influence of 
a creed which labored to withdraw the attention 
of mankind from secular to post-mortem concern- 
ments. "The fairest and fruitf ullest provinces of 
the Roman Empire," says Prof. Marsh, — "precisely 



AN EXPENSIVE CREED. 81 

that portion of terrestrial surface, in short, which, 
about the commencement of the Christian era, was 
endowed with the greatest superiority of soil, cli- 
mate, and position, which had been carried to 
the highest pitch of physical improvement, — is 
now completely exhausted of its fertility. A ter- 
ritory larger than all Europe, the abundance of 
which sustained in bygone centuries a population 
scarcely inferior to that of the whole Christian 
world at the present day, has been entirely with- 
drawn from human use, or, at best, is thinly 
inhabited. . . . There are regions where the opera- 
tion of causes, set in action by man, has brought 
the face of the earth to a desolation almost as com- 
plete as that of the moon; and, though within that 
brief space of time which we call 'the historical 
period,' they are known to have been covered with 
luxuriant woods, verdant pastures, and fertile 
meadows, they are now too far deteriorated to be 
reclaimable by man, nor can they become again 
fitted for his use except through great geological 
changes, or other agencies, over which we have no 
control. . . . Another era of equal improvidence 
would reduce this earth to such a condition of 
impoverished productiveness as to threaten the 
depravation, barbarism, and, perhaps, even the 
extinction of the human species." (Man and 
Nature, pp. 4, 43.) 

And the ruin of these countries* is not due to 
the recklessness and intentional destructiveness of 

*Asia Minor, Turkey, and Northern Africa were for 
centiiiies inhabited by priest-ridden Christians, and lost 
their f errility before they passed under the sway of their 
present master. India, Persia, and the Caucasus, and 
those parts of Southern Egypt and Eastern Armenia that 



82 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

their inhabitants, but is the inevitable conse- 
quence of a persistent attempt to follow the pre- 
cepts of an anti-natural creed. 

Christianity has retarded the progress of the 
human race by at least fifteen hundred years. 
The fruits of science and social reform, which our 
descendants will reap in fifteen centuries hence, 
might be enjoyed at the present moment, if the 
last sixty generations had not wasted their time 
in disputes about the interpretation of idiotic 
dogmas, and the attempt to gain the heaven of a 
future world by despising the blessings of the 
present. 

On the altar of her anti-natural idol, the Chris- 
tian Church has sacrificed the lives of eighteen 
millions of the noblest and bravest of our fellow- 
men. Two millions were butchered in the wars 
against the freedom-loving children of nature, the 
Saxons, the Sarmatians, and the pagan Scandina- 
vians ; one million, in the wars against the Arian 
heretics ; at least five millions, in the seven larger 
and four smaller crusades. The extermination of 
the Spanish Saracens reduced the population of 
the peninsula by seven millions. One million was 
slaughtered in the fifteen years' man-hunt against 
the Albigenses, the Thirty Years' War against the 
Protestant princes, the massacres of the French 
Huguenots, the Waldenses, and the insurgents of 
the Netherlands. A full million human lives were 
devoured by the Moloch of the Holy Inquisition 

were never under Christian control, have preserved much 
of their ancient fruitfulneas. The so-called Christian 
countries of Northern Europe were not converted before 
the eleventh century of our era, and revolted in time to 
prevent their utter ruin. 



AN EXPENSIVE CREED. 83 

and the witch tribunals, which for nearly seven 
centuries infested all the principal cities of Chris- 
tian Europe. To this number, we might add the 
twelve million aborigines of the Few World, who 
in less than a century fell victims to the insane 
fury of their Christian conquerors and the unre- 
mitting persecutions of the Christian Inquisition. 
Many of the Inquisitors were men of spotless 
personal morality. Montfort, the butcher of the 
Albigenses, was a pious and righteous cavalier. 
Jean Bodin and Judge Sprenger, the defender 
of the witch tribunals, sincerely pitied the fate of 
their victims; but their horrible creed left them 
no choice. The blood of thirty millions of our 
fellow-men cries out against the nature-hating 
fanatic who inculcated the belief in the sinfulness 
of our natural instincts, the guilt of scepticism, 
and the possibility of Satanic incarnations. 

Christianity has turned whole nations of free- 
dom-loving men into slaves and flunkeys. The 
precepts of self-abhorrence and passive submission 
to tyranny and injustice was a direct declaration 
of war against the manly self-reliance that is the 
basis of all true independence. The worst tyranny 
that has ever oppressed the children of this earth 
was perpetrated in the name of the Christian God. 
When Charlemagne conquered the land of the 
pagan Saxons, thousands of brave men were slain 
like wild beasts ; thousands were transported to the 
slave-farms of the Abbot Alcuin or imprisoned in 
Christian convents ; hundreds of widows and be- 
reaved mothers committed suicide ; hundreds of 
children were scourged to death for resisting the 



84: THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

tyranny of their jailers or trying to regain their 
liberty. The Spanish Unitarians, the Jews and 
Moriscoes, the most industrious inhabitants of the 
peninsula, were hunted frooa province to province ; 
and when, after centuries of horrible persecutions, 
a remnant of the fugitives sought a refuge in Port- 
ugal, the Christian monarch of that country was 
forced by the priests to break his promise of pro- 
tection: the refugees were banished, and their 
children dragged away to the slavery of the Chris- 
tian convents. "Piercing shrieks of anguish filled 
the land: women were known to fling their 
children into deep wells or to tear them limb 
from limb rather than resign them to the Chris- 
tians." (Lecky's History of Rationalism, ii., p. 
270.) The Church that abolished slavery in name 
promoted it in fact; for her doctrine implied 
a divine sanction of despotism, and an entire 
disregard for man's natural rights. The slave- 
barracks of ancient Rome were temples of liberty 
compared with the dungeons of the hierarchical 
torture-dens, where thousands of nature's noble- 
men vainly invoked death and madness as a refuge 
from the power of a more cruel foe. 

The ascetic dogmas of the monstrous delusion 
have darkened the life-light of countless millions ; 
for, in the zenith of its power, Pessimism rose 
almost to the climax of a worship of sorrow for 
its own sake. And, when the sources of earthly 
misery were exhausted, the Church elaborated that 
dogma of a hell of eternal and all but inevitable 
tortures, which destroyed the last solace of the 
wretched as well as the peace of daily life. Dis- 



AN EXPENSIVE CREED. 85 

senters were silenced by armed force. Pessimism 
solved the problem of inflicting the greatest possi- 
ble amount of misery on the greatest possible num- 
ber. Every appeal to common sense and mercy 
was punished as a crime against the authority of 
an infallible church ; every atrocity was sanctioned 
that would help to crush the instinct of free inquiry, 
the dignity of manhood, the sense of justice, the 
love of joy, freedom, and na,ture. How many thou- 
sands of the countless victims who were induced to 
take the vow of the monastic orders must have 
awakened to the significance of their sacrifice, and 
sought, too late, to regain a world which to them 
was as hopelessly lost as if they had crossed the 
ferry of Styx ! How many children of the joy-lov- 
ing nations, whose countries had been cursed with 
the gloom of the cross, must have pined for the 
freedom of nature as the captives of Tartarus 
pined for the sunlight of the upper world ; or 
sought refuge in death, in the hope of reaching a 
land where the code of Pessimism was unknown. 
"According to that code," says Buckle, "all the 
natural affections, all social pleasures, all amuse- 
ments, and all the joyous instincts of the human 
heart were sinful. . . . The clergy looked on all com- 
forts as sinful in themselves, merely because they 
were comforts. The great object of life was to be 
in a state of constant affliction. Whatever pleased 
the senses was to be suspected. It mattered not 
what a man liked : the mere fact of his liking it 
made it sinful. Whatever was natural was wrong." 
And that creed dares to boast of its charitable in- 
stitutions! The charity of the Christian Church 



86 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

is the charity of the fanatic, who for the love of 
heaven turned a flower-garden into a desert, and 
for the love of earth housed a few of the withered 
plants and watered them with his sickly tears. 

The Christian Church has spread the blight of 
its influence far beyond the boundaries of her spir- 
itual empire. The freedom of the North-European 
pagans and the civilization of the South-European 
Moors succumbed to the incessant attacks of their 
Christian neighbors, instigated by the light-and- 
freedom-hating fanaticism of their priests. 

The dogmas of the Christian Church have smit- 
ten its victims with the nauseous disease of hypoc- 
risy. The atmosphere of our whole social life is 
tainted with the poison of cant and dissimulation. 
By invoking the aid of the secular powers to pro- 
tect the authority of dagmas which to all clear- 
sighted men have become a mixture of blasphemy 
and absolute nonsense, the Church o:ffers a pre- 
mium for intellectual dishonesty. Every lover of 
truth is branded with the reproach of eccentricity 
by the upholders of a system whose centre has 
always been an untruth, and generally a very 
transparent untruth. After doing their best to 
turn this world into a hell, after insulting the 
Creator by disregarding his physical laws and de- 
vspising his marvellous earth, the moralists of the 
Galilean Church hope to conciliate this favor by 
lying for the glory of his "son." 

The anti-natural dogmas of the Christian Church 
have so perverted our ideas of duty and natural 
religion that the worst enemies of mankind per- 
petrated their enormities for the sake of conscience, 



AN EXPENSIVE CREED. 87 

and millions still despise this earth for the sake of 
heaven. Neither the vices of the Roman Caesar 
nor the excesses of the French Revolution have 
contributed so much to weaken the respect for the 
authority of the law as the systematic inhuman- 
ity of the Christian Middle Ages, when laws were 
so intolerable that only the lawless could enjoy 
life, — outlaws and irresponsible princes, Robin 
Hood and Robert le Diable. The delusion of 
anti-naturalism has certainly caused more mischief 
than the bane of all human vices taken together. 
"Translated into plain speech, the foundation- 
principle of our system of ethics is this : that all 
natural things, especially our natural instincts, are 
essentially evil, and that salvation depends upon 
mysterious, anti-natural, and even supernatural 
remedies. This bottom error has long biassed all 
our physical and metaphysical theories. The use 
of our reasoning powers is naturally as agreeable 
as the exercise of any other normal function. The 
anti-naturalists declared war against free inquiry, 
assured us that the study of logic and natural sci- 
ence is highly dangerous, and that the seeker after 
truth must content himself with the light of ghostly 
revelations. We have since ascertained that the 
ghosts are grossly ignorant in aJl terrestrial con- 
cernments, and that their reports on the supra- 
mundane state of affairs are, to say the least, sus- 
piciously conflicting. In all but the vilest creatures, 
the love of freedom is as powerful as the instinct 
of self-preservation. The anti-naturalists incul- 
cated the dogma of implicit submission to secular 
and spiritual authorities. The experiment was 



88 THE SECHET OF THE EAST. 

tried on the grandest scale ; and the result has de- 
monstrated that blind faith leads to idiocy, and that 
absolute monarchs must be absolutely abolished. 
The testimony of our noses justifies the opinion 
that fresh air is preferable to prison smells : the 
anti-naturalists informed us that at various sea- 
sons of the year, and every night, the out-door 
atmosphere becomes mortiferous, and that sleepers 
and invalids ought to be confined in air-tight apart- 
ments. We believed, till we found that the most 
implicit believers got rotten with scrofula. Happi- 
ness is the normal condition of every living creat- 
ure ; for, in a state of nature, every normal function 
is connected with a pleasurable sensation. 'To 
enjoy is to obey.' Animals have not lost their 
earthly paradise: he who has observed them in 
the freedom of their forest-homes cannot doubt 
that to them existence is a blessing, and death 
merely the later or earlier evening of a happy day. 
The anti-naturalists assured us that God delights 
in the self-abasement and mortification of his 
creatures, and hoped to gain his favor by afflicting 
themselves in every possible way, — by voluntary 
seclusion, fasts, vigils, the wearing of dingy gar- 
ments, and abstinence from every physical pleas- 
ure. Failing to enamour mankind with their dole- 
ful heaven, they revenged themselves by depriving 
them of their earthly joys. In hopes of making 
the hereafter more attractive, they made life as 
repulsive as possible : kill- joys and persecutors 
were the active heroes of those times ; ascetics and 
self-tormentors, their passive exemplars. Virtue 
and joylessness became synonymes. Men aspiring 



AN EXPENSIVE CREED. 8D 

to superior merit exchanged the glories of the 
sunny earth for the misery of a gloomy convent. 
*A man of sorrows' became a type of moral per- 
fection. The cross, an instrument of torture, be- 
came the trade-mark of the new religion. Kosmos 
— i.e., beauty and harmony — was the oldest Gre- 
cian term for God's wonderful world; a 'vale of 
tears,' the favorite Christian epithet. 

" 'Worldly pleasures' are still under the ban of 
our spiritual pm-ists. Daily drudgery and daily 
self-denial are still considered the proper sphere of 
a law-abiding citizen, and special affliction a spe- 
cial sign of divine favor. Life has become a soc- 
age duty. We do not think it necessary to allevi- 
ate the distress of the poor till it reaches a degree 
that threatens to end it. We have countless be- 
nevolent institutions for the prevention of out- 
right death, not one benevolent enough to make 
life worth living. Infanticide is now far more rig- 
orously punished than in old times. We enforce 
every child's right to live and become a humble, 
tithe-paying Christian ; but, as for its claim to live 
happy, we refer it to the sweet by-and-by. We 
shudder at the barbarity of the Caesars, who per- 
mitted the combat of men with wild beasts to cater 
to the amusement of the Roman populace ; but we 
contemplate with great equanimity the misery of 
millions of our fellow-citizens wearing away their 
lives in work-shops and factories : millions of chil- 
dren of our own nation and country who have no 
recreation but sleep, no hope but oblivion ; to whom 
the morning sun brings the summons of a task-mas- 
ter, and the summer season nothing but lengthened 



90 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

hours of weary toil, — nay, we make it the boast of 
our pious civilization to deprive them of their sole 
day of leisure, to interdict their harmless sports 
lest the noise, or even the rumor of their merri- 
ment, might disturb the solemnity of an assem- 
blage of whining hypocrites. Hence, the reckless- 
ness, the nihilism, and the weary pessimism of our 
times, the melancholy that everywhere underlies 
the glittering varnish of our social life. Hence, 
also, that vague yearning after a happier hereafter, 
which the murderers of the happy past have made 
the principal source of their revenues. 

"The Christian dogma of the reformatory value 
of misery has been refuted by the most dreadful 
arguments in the world's history. The unhappiest 
nations are not only the most immoral, but the 
most selfish and the meanest, in every ugly sense 
of the word. Virtues do not flourish on a trampled 
soiL Genius, too, is a child of light. The Gre- 
cian worship of joy favored the development of 
every human science, while the monastic worship 
of sorrow produced nothing but monsters and chi- 
meras ; for, to modern science, Christianity bears 
about the same relation as the plague does to the 
quarantine." (Physical Education^ p. 186.) 

The doctrine of anti-naturalism still perverts the 
principles of our system of education, as it per- 
verted the ethics, the science, the social tendencies, 
and the religion of the Middle Ages. It is the 
extra-mundane fulcrum of the lever that forced 
the moral world from its normal orbit. 

Has the happiness of the human race been se- 
cured, or in any degree promoted, by the dogmas of 



AN EXPENSIVE CREED. 91 

the Christian religion? Cowardice and stupidity 
have too long connived at the crime of abetting 
the dissemination of that earth-blighting supersti- 
tion, and it is time to say the truth in plain terms. 
The demonstrable truth then is that, if all the 
countries of Europe that were destined to pass 
under the yoke of the cross had, instead, for a 
thousand years been covered by the ashes of the 
fire-storm that buried the cities of Pompeii and 
Herculaneum, the world would to-day be benefited 
by the result. Our earth would be more fertile 
and populous, our fellow-men would be freer, wiser, 
and happier. The waste of the volcanic cinders 
would have proved less irreclaimable than the des- 
ert of pessimism. The survivors of the catas- 
trophe would have saved their children from the 
alternative of death or moral slavery that awaited 
the next forty generations of their descendants. 
The nations of the Caucasian race would have 
been spared the systematic extirpation of their 
wisest and bravest men. The Saracens, whose 
western empire was destroyed by the insane fanati- 
cism of the Christian priests, would have culti- 
vated the garden of civilization in a more grateful 
soil. The discoverers of America would not have 
deluged the New World with a sea of blood. The 
relics of pagan art and science would have been 
safer in the custody of the elements than in the 
hands of the monkish forgers and fanatics. 

We read of Ammonite devotees sacrificing their 
first-born to Moloch; of Egyptian peasants starv- 
ing their children, to fatten a herd of lazy der- 
vishes ; of Hindu pilgrims performing seventy-seven 



92 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

thousand seven hundred and seventy-seven somer- 
saults, "for the benefit of their souls," and compell- 
ing their families to join in the exercise. But 
such poor maniacs are, after all, less to blame than 
the juggler-guild of priests and mystics who first 
persuaded them to renounce their right of free in- 
vestigation in favor of any human authority. As 
soon as reason surrenders to a dogma, the power of 
the exponents of that dogma becomes autocratic : 
they can securely further their selfish interests by 
almost any outrage on common sense and justice. 
If the philosophers of future centuries should rec- 
ognize this chief root of superstition, they will 
perhaps acquit the nations of the Dark Ages from 
the guilt of their manifold sins against nature, and 
explain their strangest delusions, with one excep- 
tion. If they read the history of pessimism and 
the fate of the nations who had accepted its doc- 
trines, they will fail to understand how the author 
of that creed could ever be mistaken for a Saviour. 



CHAPTER YIL 

DAYBREAK. 

And many of tliem that sleep in the dust of the earth 
shall awake.— Daniel xii., 2. 

The revival of rationalism at the beginning of 
the sixteenth century forms the turning-point and 
the most interesting era in the history of the Mid- 
dle Ages ; for all the developments of our present 
civilization can be traced to germs which then first 
ventured into the light of day. But the researches 
of the few free-thinking historians of that period 
have been sedulously perverted by the hired petti- 
foggers of the Christian cliques. The insurrection 
against the authority of the Church has been 
ascribed to the national antipathies of the Latin 
and German races, to a revival of Latin literature 
and paganism, to the lessons of the Crusades, to 
the intrigues of the Spanish Jews, to the panthe- 
ism of Averroes and other Moorish philosophers. 
The most extravagant theories have been elabo- 
rated to avoid the confession of the simple truth, — 
that the excess of the evil itself produced a reac- 
tion which led to its abatement. 

Like the idol of the Baal priests, insatiable de- 
vourers sooner or later swallow an explosive mixt- 
ure ; and the very triumphs of an intolerable tyr- 
anny have thus often led to its overthrow. The 
power of the Roman Empire was broken by the 
revolt of barbarians whose troops had been trained 



94: THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

in the imperial armies. The Turks selected their 
janizaries from the stoutest young men of the van- 
quished Slavonians, and these very janizaries 
eventually compassed the ruin of the Ottoman 
Empire. During the first ten centuries of the 
Christian era, the power of the Church was bal- 
anced in the North by the untamed pride of the 
Teutonic princes, and in the South by the linger- 
ing influence of pagan philosophy. The fanati- 
cism of her militant apostles prevailed against valor 
and common sense, but the plenitude of her tri- 
umph proved fatal to her supremacy. Europe had 
become an ecclesiastical allodium. Wealth, the 
treasures of literature, the control of the censor- 
ship, the institutes of learning, were almost en- 
tirely in the hands of the clergy. Legislators were 
their obedient tools. The civilization of the Moors 
had been annihilated. The high-schools of Toledo 
and Cordova had lost their protectors. The estab- 
lishment of the Inquisition and the vigilance of 
her spies insured the punishment of non-conform- 
ists. In less than a century, the prodigious num- 
ber of convents had more than doubled. In 
1450, the Franciscans had sixteen thousand two 
hundred convents. In 1520, the subdivision of 
the order known as the "Observants'* had thirty- 
four thousand monasteries of their own. In the 
fifteenth century, the Dominicans and Augustin- 
ians had spread all over Western Europe. In 
many parts of Spain there were six friars and two 
priests for every dozen workingmen. In Spain and 
Portugal, the Jews had shared the fate of the 
Moriscoes ; and, in Germany, the Inquisitor Hog- 



DAYBREAK. 95 

straaten attempted tlie destruction of their entire 
literature, with the exception of the Old Testa- 
ment. Free thinkers were not only unaided in the 
pursuit of truth, but effectually debarred from its 
dissemination. The Church controlled the whole 
machinery of education, and the votaries of knowl- 
edge had to become priests or monks. Among the 
many millions who entered the monasteries in 
search of peace or in quest of the refectory, a few 
hundred came with higher aims, and their unselfish 
love of truth drove them to a fierce rebellion against 
the power of her enemies. The Church that tried to 
digest this mixture of monachism and philosophy 
found that she had swallowed the prescription of 
Daniel. The font of her consecrated water had 
been vaunted as the fountain of truth. All other 
well-springs of knowledge had been stopped, and 
pilgrims whose thirst could not be stilled with 
sophisms had been admitted behind the scenes. 
The revelations that dispelled the shadows of the 
Middle Ages did not come from Cordova or Bag- 
dad, but from the strongholds of the Christian 
hierarchy. Luther, Campanella, Eckardt, Charron, 
Eoger Bacon, Lipsius, and Jordan Bruno were 
monks. Duns Scotus, Vanini, Abelard, and Wool- 
ston were theologians. Jean Meslier was a Catho- 
lic clergyman. These men, and hundreds of their 
contemporaries, had entered the Church without 
any special bias in favor of anti-naturalism. In 
Northern Germany, the word " Pfaffe'* (a Romish 
priest) had never ceased to be a synonyme of 
everything unmanly and contemptible. In South- 
ern Italy, the descendants of the old hero race still 



96 THE SECKET OF THE EAST. 

cherished the traditions of their forefathers, and 
hated the chains which they were unable to break. 

In the hearts of such men, the study of ancient 
history, the echoes from the paradise of the past, 
and the knowledge of the true character of the 
moralists who had sacrificed that paradise to force 
their way to the throne of the world, — this knowl- 
edge, and the comparison of the past and present 
condition of their native lands, must have pro- 
duced a degree of indignation which we can only 
conceive by imagining an analogy of our own 
country and age. 

Suppose that the Californian Chinese manage to 
propagate a superstition which finally enables them 
to subvert the civilization of the Xorth American 
continent. The new Celestial Empire is governed 
on the principle of Buddha, that all earthly posses- 
sions are vain, and that salvation can be obtained 
only by suppressing our natural instincts. By the 
alliance of Pagoda and State, the Buddhists secure 
the aid of the civil powers, and, in return, sanc- 
tion the basest tyrannies of the secular rulers by 
inculcating the duty of passive submission to "the 
powers that be." * In the summit regions of the 

* As long as their own necks were in dansi^er, the clerics of 
the early Christian Church inveighed against tyranny and 
intolerance; but, as soon as that danger was past, the doc- 
trine of passive submission to injustice bore its natural 
fruit, and the lot of the European peasantry became infi- 
nitely worse than that of the so-called slaves of the Roman 
Empire and the Grecian Republics, where their servitude 
was so often merely nominal, as many of them were em- 
ployed as pedagogues and artists,— nay, as bankers, actors, 
and historians. Besides, the worst Roman despots en- 
slaved only foreign prisoners of war, while the Christian 
princes, bishops, and abbots enslaved their own country- 
men, and treated them with a degree of relentless and sys- 
tematic inhumanity that produced an incomparably greater 
aggregate of misery than the occasional truculent caprices 
of the pagan tyrants. 



DAYBREAK. 97 

Rocky Mountains, a few Anglo-American tribes 
still maintain the independence of their Republi- 
can forefathers ; but the farmers of the plains are 
captured, branded like sheep, and divided in 
chain-gangs to work for the monks of the 
Buddhistic convents that spring up like mush- 
rooms in every town. Turner Halls, gymnasiums,* 
and public baths f are suppressed as "fleshly vani- 
ties," tending to divert the minds of men from 
things spiritual. Our public libraries are demol- 
ished ; J some of the larger volumes are packed off 
to the monasteries, not from an appreciation of 
their literary value, but for the sake of their fly- 
leaves and blank margins, which are to be used for 
the record of Buddhistic ghost stories. The New 
England universities are closed by order of the 
Grand Mandarin. § Industrial progress is limited 
to the invention of improved machinery for the 
torture of heretics. The government bounty for 
timber plantations is discontinued. The forests 
are devastated, and the bonzes advise the proprie- 
tors to avert droughts by prayer-meetings. The 
Grand Lama instructs his provincials to suppress 
unbelief by the enforcement of an elaborate penal 
code. Thousands of scholars are burned alive for 
maintaining the difference between one and three. 

*The Olympic festivals and the Capitoline games were 
suppressed by order of the Christian Emperor Theodosius, 
A.D. 394. 

t The Spanish clergy abolished the public baths of the 
Moriscoes. Even baths in private houses were at last inter- 
dicted. 

t The Christian monks destroyed the Serapian Library of 
Alexandria and murdered the citizens who resisted the 
vandalism, A.D. 389. 

§ The University of Athens and the academies of Berytus 
and Thessalonica were suppressed by order of the Chris- 
tian Emperor Justinian. 



98 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

Mathematicians are treated as enemies of the hu- 
man race.* The professors of the Washington 
Observatory receive forty bamboo stripes for de- 
monstrating the annual motion of the earth, and 
twenty-five extra for maintaining her diurnal mo- 
tion. Public festivals are enlivened by the whole- 
sale burning of misbelievers. All cities, all schools, 
all places of public resort are infested with the 
spies of the Mongolian Inquisition. Clerical ter- 
rorism depopulates the land. Misery and famine 
follow in the wake of the Buddhistic propagan- 
dists. The industrial classes abandon their homes 
by thousands. Buddhistic monks fatten on the 
spoils of the exiles ; but before the families of non- 
conformists are permitted to depart, their sons and 
daughters are dragged away to the slavery of the 
Mongolian convent. Would we not, like the Span- 
ish Moors, tear our children limb from limb to pre- 
serve them from such a fate ? 

Yet all this is a mere outline of the change from 
the civilization of the nature-loving pagans to the 
barbarism of the Galilean pessimists : the realities 
of the Middle Ages supplied the details of the 
dreadful contrast. The very stones of the South- 
European convents still proclaimed the godlike 
forms of the men who celebrated life as a festival, 
and whose desecrated temples now housed a whin- 
ing brood of nature-hating and nature-hated cari- 
catures of the human shape. 

The peasants of the North still cherished the 
battle-hymns and hunting-songs of their free fore- 

* Justinian and several of his successors issued edicts 
for the ''suppression of mathematicians." 



DAYBREAK. 99 

fathers, while their children were forced to chant 
the puling cant of the Christian litany. The tra- 
ditions of the folk-lore still preserved the memory 
of a time when the arena of life awarded its 
wreaths to valor and manly strength, while now 
hypocrisy and servility were the beaten roads to 
advancement. Wasted fields, starving hamlets, 
and gloomy cloisters covered the face of the earth 
where sculptured ruins mourned the glory of by- 
gone times ; the temples and palaces of Italy, the 
academies of Greece, the sacred groves of Daphne, 
the shady mountain forests of Taurus and Leb- 
anon, had been devastated to fatten the foul vam- 
pires of the Galilean Church. 

Not need we doubt that the clearer-sighted 
students of ancient literature had discerned the 
change which had come over the moral world. No 
educational bias could entirely blind them to the 
glaring contrast between the logic, the critical 
acumen, the manly eloquence, the noble self-reli- 
ance, the sublime poetry of the Pagan philosophers 
and old Hebrew prophets, and the idiotic rant and 
disgusting sophistry of the monastic writers. No 
great poet, no independent philosopher, had ap- 
peared for the last eleven centuries. The Muses 
had fled the desecrated land; the laurel withered 
in the soil of pessimism; Nature had revenged 
herself upon her enemies. The philosophers of 
the sixteenth century might fail to recognize the 
secret of pessimism, but they could not help seeing 
the result of its tendencies, the stultifying, soul- 
diseasing, unmanning, debasing, and earth-blight- 
ing influence of its dogmas. They saw that 



100 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

hypocrites and sycophants prospered, while thou- 
sands of free thinkers, many of whom they must 
have known as the truest of Nature's noblemen, 
had to rot behind prison walls, or could fertilize 
the seed of liberty only with their blood. What 
had the world gained by its conversion from 
Naturalism to Anti-naturalism? "Faith," blind 
faith, the supposed soul-saving merit of mental 
prostitution, as the only recompense for so many 
sacrifices. And now the foundations of that faith 
proved unsound, nay, utterly unsubstantial and 
untenable. The honest inquirers into the evidences 
of the saving faith awakened to a recognition of 
the fact that the supposed heavenly star which had 
lured the last forty generations to neglect and ruin 
their earth was the ignis fatuus of a bottomless 
swamp. In short, the fearful truth dawned upon 
them that the paradise of antiquity had been sac- 
rificed in vain. They could no longer doubt that 
the chains which galled the noblest races of Eu- 
rope were an unmixed curse, and the worst curse 
which had ever befallen the children of men. 
That this conviction begat a thirst for freedom 
which often overcame the fear of death is proved 
by the martyrdom of the twenty-six thousand 
Protestants, in the noblest sense of the word, who 
in the course of the sixteenth century bartered 
their lives for the luxury of breaking the silence 
which threatened to crush their hearts.* Those 
who declined the crown of martyrdom or hoped 

♦Between 1500 and 1580, the Inquisition murdered two 
liundred and seventy thousand non-conformists. Nine- 
tenths of these were American pagans and Spanish Mo- 
hammedans and Jews ; the rest were Caucasian sceptics. 



DAYBREAK. 101 

to see the dawn of a better day, and yet wished to 
promote its advent, adopted two indirect methods 
of attaining their object. They veiled their reve- 
lations in the language of allegory, like Eckardt, 
Silesius, and Campanella, or they published their 
views in the name of former free thinkers, and for 
the feigned purpose of refuting them. The latter 
plan was adopted by Reuchlin, Lipsius, and Wool- 
ston, and with eminent success by the precursor 
of Voltaire, Lucilio Vanini. Thomas Woolston's 
Apology is not weaker than his statement of the 
heresies he pretends to controvert. But Vanini's 
Amphitheatre anticipates the best arguments of 
Voltaire, Hume, and Thomas Paine. The mas- 
terly exposition of these arguments — in pretended 
quotations from the writings of obscure heretics — 
is followed by a not less masterly burlesque of 
the monkish method of controversy, clumsy dog- 
matism, personalities, and swaggering threats. 
Yet this scathing satire not only received the 
imprimatur of the government censor, but was 
published with the special recommendation of an 
ecclesiastical college, and did, probably, more to 
disseminate anti-clerical tenets than any work of 
the professed reformers. But no man can always 
wear a mask. In Toulouse, Vanini discovered him- 
self to a better-masked bigot, who hastened to 
betray him to the Holy Inquisition. He was 
burned at the stake. Jordan Bruno, Savonarola, 
Leszynski, Arnold of Brescia, Stephen Dolet, 
Mathew Hamount, were tortured and burned. 
Campanella was racked and persecuted till a 
merciful death ended his misery; Roger Bacon 



102 THE 3ECRET OF THE EAST. 

was persecuted and exiled; Thomas Woolston 
died in prison; Eckardt, Abelard, and Lipsius 
were bullied into silence. Their works were 
burned, their disciples were suppressed ; but their 
labor had not been in vain. Their fate had proved 
that only the success of an open rebellion could 
liberate the human race from the hell of Anti- 
naturalism ; and only in this sense is it true that 
the fiendish intolerance of the Middle Ages has 
promoted the progress of European civilization.* 

♦Every nepltts ultra is interesting, and the impudence of 
Jesuitical sophistry has never surpassed the following 
dictum of a Protestant Jesuit: "So large a thinker as 
Albert R6ville has expressed his belief that the intolerance 
of Christianity indicated a passionate love of truth, which 
has created modem, science. He says that, 'if Europe had 
not passed through those ages of intolerance, it is doubtful 
whether the science of our day would ever have arrived.' " 
— North American Review, May, 1883, p. 473. In justice t« 
the honor of our age, I must quote another contemporary. 
"The persecutor," says W. H. Lecky, *'can never be certain 
that he is not persecuting truth rather than error, but he 
may be quite certain that he is suppressing the spirit of 
truth. And, indeed, it is no exaggeration to say that the 
doctrines I have reviewed represent the most skilful and 
at the same time most successful conspiracy against that 
spirit that has ever existed among mankind. Until the 
seventeenth century, every mental disposition which phi- 
losophy pronounces to be essential to a legitimate research 
was almost uniformly branded as a sin; and a large pro- 
portion of the most deadly intellectual vices were delib- 
erately inculcated as virtues. ... In a word, there i3 scarcely 
a disposition that marks the love of abstract truth, and 
scarcely a rule which reason teaches as essential for its 
attainment that theologians did not for centuries* stigma- 
tize as offensive to the Almighty,"— flfof. Tiat., vol. ii., p. 90. 

"Every man loves liberty," says Ludwig Boerne; "but 
the unjust claims it for himself alone, the just for all." 
Between dogmatism and the "love of truth" there is just 
as much difference as between despotism and the love of 
freedom. A disposition to take liberties would be a queer 
claim to the merit of liberalism. In the last eight years of 
his reign, the Czar Nicholas sentenced forty-two thousand 
political prisoners to the Siberian mines or the worse mis- 
ery of a Russian jail, and at his command eleven thousand 
Polish boys were torn from their parents and dragged 
away to the military barracks of Eastern Russia. These 
exploits of the Slavonic Pope the eulogist of Mons. Albert 
R6vilie would probably ascribe to a passionate love of lib- 



DAYBREAK. 103 

The tyranny of the Church led to the Protestant 
Revolt, as the tyranny of the French autocrats led 
to the French Revolution. Christian intolerance 
has promoted science as the plague has promoted 
the quarantine. 

erty,— the liberty of tyrannizing his subjects. For more 
than eleven hundred years, the activity of Monsieur Re- 
ville's passionate friends obstructed the progress of all 
sciences, with two exceptions; for it cannot be denied that 
they successfully cultivated the science of forging miracu- 
lous biographies and the science of suppressing free in- 
quiry. 



CHAPTER Vni. 

THE PROTESTANT REVOLT. 

Tyranny begins her arguments by fettering free speech. 
Begin your reply by breaking your fetters.— Afira&eaw. 

The analogies of body and mind are most 
strikingly exhibited in the development of physi- 
cal and moral poison-habits. At first, every poison 
is repulsive. Children abhor the very smell of 
alcohol. The first effect of tobacco is that of a 
nauseating drug. The disgusting taste of opium 
prevails through every disguise. Nature protests 
against the incipience of an insidious "second nat- 
ure," and this protective instinct often saves where 
neither law nor science yields its aid. In the slum- 
alleys of our great cities, and beset by daily tempta- 
tions, the children of poverty and ignorance often 
preserve their physical purity by an innate repug- 
nance to vice; and even in Northern China there is 
a "Vigilance Society," whose members, in defiance 
of law, pledge themselves to antagonize the abettors 
of the opium traffic and use all possible means to 
restrict an evil which they cannot suppress. Gross 
vices do not achieve an easy conquest : the protests 
of a faithful conscience warn us again and again ; 
but, if that protest is persistently disregarded, nat- 
ure at last adapts herself to the abnormal condi- 
tion, and the instinctive repugnance gives way 
to a morbid craving for the unnatural stimulus. 
Healthy food grows insipid. The toper becomes a 



THE PROTESTANT REVOLT. 105 

slave to his drug ; and, by educational influences, 
the baneful habit may develop into a hereditary or 
even national vice. 

In a similar way, such moral poisons as hypoc- 
risy, the miracle-mania, and pessimism have to 
overcome the resistance of every healthier instinct 
before they can enslave the mind of a whole na- 
tion. In Southern Europe, the doctrines of the Gal- 
ilean Church have achieved this victory. Among 
the Caucasian races of the Mediterranean penin- 
sula, millions of our fellow-men have lost the 
normal instincts of their species, and have come to 
enjoy the poison of anti-naturalism. The Greek 
and Roman monks vied in self-abasement, self- 
mutilation, and the voluntary sacrifice of their 
reason, as their forefathers vied in science and he- 
roic games. Patriotism has withered under the 
influence of anti-natural dogmas. Unmanliness 
has ceased to be a reproach. Manly self-reliance 
and athletic sports have lost their charm. The 
prescriptions of the Jesuitical poison - mongers 
have made simple truth insipid : their victims have 
contracted a morbid craving for supernaturalism, 
and love caht for its own sake. The Celtic races, 
whose forefathers had become inured to the vicissi- 
tudes of anarchy and despotism, have accepted the 
yoke of the cross and reserved their protestantism 
for the struggles of the political arena. Their 
priests have maintained their influence by catering 
to their national prejudices. 

But the Germanic races of Northern Europe 
have never been really converted. Their fore- 
fathers were compelled to submit to the logic of 



106 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

superior force ; but their acquiescence was that of 
the North-China Vigilance Society — a latent pro- 
test. Their conqueror had to baptize them in 
their own blood, and they yielded only after all 
their able-bodied men had literally been cut into 
pieces. In the winter of 772, the apostle of North- 
ern Germany crossed the Weser with an army of 
sixty thousand men, and founded the bishoprics of 
Halberstadt, Minden, and Paderbom; while the 
natives disputed every inch of the ground, and 
only retreated after the devastation of their vil- 
lages had deprived them of the means of subsist- 
ence. Two years after, they rallied their forces, 
expelled their priests, and chased them across the 
Rhine, when the return of Charlemagne compelled 
them once more to yield their homes to the spoiler 
and take refuge in the wilds of the far North-east. 
Here, they were attacked in 776, and repelled the 
invaders with such slaughter that the royal propa- 
gandist thought it wiser to confine his efforts to 
the Westphalian lowlands. New bishoprics were 
founded; and the remaining inhabitants shared 
the fate of the peasantry in the priest-ridden 
Frankish crown-lands, and were treated worse 
than brute beasts, till the menaces of the Spanish 
Moors called their oppressor across the Pyrenees. 
As soon as he was gone, all Saxony rose in a fierce 
insurrection. The hero AVittekind united the 
scattered tribes, and advanced as far as Osnabriick, 
but was soon confronted by all the forces of the 
Frankish Empire; and, during the next seven 
years, a war of extermination turned his native 
land into a desert. Y/hen the insurgents had been 



THE PROTESTAXT REVOLT. 107 

driven into the furthest recesses of the Hartz 
Mountains, the priests returned; and the "con- 
verted" Saxons tilled their land as duly baptized 
bondsmen till 792, when the intolerable despotism 
of their oppressor goaded them into a fresh rebel- 
lion. But the dire tactics of the iron-clad Franks 
prevailed again, and the war now became a re- 
morseless man-hunt. The natives were waylaid at 
the ruins of their homesteads and at the river- 
fords. Thousands of women and children were 
dragged off into exile, and the male captives were 
slain like wolves. In Quedlinburg alone, four 
thousand prisoners were beheaded in one day. 

There was no gainsaying such arguments, and 
the next twenty generations of the Saxon yeomen 
acted on the principle that "Christian submission 
to the powers that be" may sometimes be the safest 
plan. But no other slaves have so loathed the 
chains they could not break. When famine and 
defeat began to thin the ranks of Prince Witte- 
kind, the Franks erected large crosses, as rallying- 
places for "converts"; i.e., deserters, who wished to 
accept baptism and the bread of bondage. Zu 
Kreuze kriechen (crawling to cross) has ever since 
been the most contemptuous term in the German 
language. Pfaffenihum and pfdffisch (ivQin Pfaffe, 
a Romish priest) have become the synonym es of 
obscurantism and Jesuitical intrigues. The heroes 
of the national ballads were not the whining 
saints of the Romish Church, but men like Robin 
Hood or Ritter Siegfried and Tannhauser. The 
favorite political leaders were free thinkers, like 
Otto L, Frederic Barbarossa (as afterward Frederic 



108 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

the Great), or Goetz von Berlichingen, Ulric Hut- 
ten, and George Frundsberg, who openly adopted 
the motto, "Gottes Freund, der Pfaffen Feind." 

The descendants of the manful old Odin- wor- 
shippers still prayed to a hero-protecting, bounte- 
ous All-father rather than to a joy-hating, cant- 
loving "head-of-the-clerical-interest." Long after 
the litanies and groaning procession hymns of 
Southern Europe had silenced the lyre of Anac- 
reon, and even in Southern Germany passion-plays 
had superseded the lays of the minnesingers, the 
songs of the North still breathed a fervid love of 
nature.* Throughout Northern Europe, and long 
before Luther, independence and protestantism 
were as invariable concomitants as faith and 
slavery. The German nobles paid neither spirit- 
ual nor material tithes. A few of them kept pri- 
vate chaplains, in order to complete the clientele of 
a liberal household, or for educational purposes (as 
their successors still employ candidates of theol- 
ogy) ; but their practical habits were the very an- 
tithesis of monkish humility, and that anti-natural 
renunciation of earthly happiness which the Church 
represented as the highest type of human virtue. 

* In the Streitfragen (Minden, Wilhelm Kohler) for Janu- 
ary, 1881, Prof. Kepler quotes the following "Alte Jager- 
Lied" (Old Hunter's Song):— 

"Nun steig' ich nimmer wieder ins graue Dorf binab. 
Im Walde will ich wohnen ; im Wald grabt mir mein Grab : 
Wo mir des Pf arrer's Kiihe nicht drauf zur Weide gehn ; 
Das Wild soil driiber springen, kein Kreuz im Wege 
stehn!" 

Literally:— 
"Now, nevermore shall I return to the gray old village. 
In the woods let me live; in the woods dig me my ^rave: 
Where the cows of the priest cannot batten upon its grass; 
Above it let the wild deer play, no Christian cross stand in 
the way." 



THE PROTESTANT REVOLT. 109 

"Self-help" was their motto. They redressed their 
own wrongs, and maintained their rights even 
against their sovereign. In their castle halls, the 
rule of free speech recognized no higher law what- 
ever. They did not devote their holidays to the 
self-afflictions of nature-hating fanatics, but to the 
recreations of their free ancestors, — to the chase, 
to songs, and athletic sports. At a time when the 
Spanish cavaliers competed for the honor of march- 
ing in procession with the pageant of an auto-da- 
fe, Francis von Sickingen risked his head rather 
than surrender the free thinker Hutten, and Martin 
Luther found a protector in every German noble- 
man.* As soon as the cities of the Hanseatic 
League became strong enough to resist the tyranny 
of the Church, they exhibited the same spirit of 
defiance ; and several of the North-German free 
towns renounced the advantage of a papal recogni- 
tion rather than comply with the demands of the 
In quisitor-gener al. 

The priests, in the mean time, had not been idle. 
Their recognized efficiency as the allies of despot- 
ism secured them the connivance of every despotic 
ruler ; they controlled the educational institutions ; 
they influenced legislation ; they founded convents 
and seminaries. But, in spite of all that, their 
Church remained an exotic plant, and had con- 

* At a time when a man had to choose between slavery 
and lawless independence, the chivalry of Northern Eu- 
rope often maintained that independence at the expense 
of their fellow-men ; but, in better times, they have pro- 
duced many of those truest friends of liberty who demand 
freedom for others as well as for themselves,— e.g^., Coligny, 
Volney, Hutten, Holbach, Philip of Hessen, Stein, Hum- 
boldt, De Ligne, Mansfield, Bolingbroke, Byron, Halifax, 
Queensbury, Egmont, Bameveldt, Kossuth, Bathyani. 



110 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

stantly to be fertilized by papal subsidies. Like 
the North-China Temperance League, the nations 
of Northern Europe were forced to connive at a 
pernicious poison-traffic, but never ceased to detest 
the poison. The temptations of the anti-natural- 
ists had failed to corrupt their healthier instincts. 
Hence, the apparent paradox that the latest con- 
verts were the first to revolt ; while those who had 
suffered most under the yoke of the Church were 
unable or unwilling to break their chains. For 
those chains were the fetters of an inveterate 
poison-vice. "Hear me first a few words," said a 
young man, whom Dr. Mussey had admonished 
about his intemperate propensities, "and then you 
may proceed. I am sensible that an indulgence 
in this habit will lead to loss of property, the loss 
of reputation, the loss of domestic happiness, to 
premature death, and to the irretrievable loss of 
my immortal soul ; and now, with all this convic- 
tion resting firmly on my mind and flashing over 
my conscience like lightning, if I still continue to 
drink, do you suppose anything you can say will 
deter me from the practice ?" 

In similar words. Cardinal Retz might have 
answered the arguments of Erasmus. For the 
nations of the Latin races, the chance of salvation 
had come too late. The brain — their enlightened 
men — clearly saw the coming tophet of degenera- 
tion and national bankruptcy ; but the body of the 
people were intoxicated with the fumes of the 
Moloch fire, and pursued the road to ruin like 
blindfolded victims. The poison of anti-natural- 
ism had fastened upon their souls. They had lost 



THE PROTESTANT REVOLT. Ill 

not only their liberty, but their desire for libera- 
tion. The systematic murder of all avowed free 
thinkers had emasculated the national mind. 
They were contentedly ignorant. They had 
ceased to despise mental prostitution. They had 
come to enjoy the ceremonies and wretched mum- 
meries of their Church. Spain and Portugal have 
sunk to the level of the East-Buddhistic nations. 
Ireland, Southern Germany, and Southern France 
still sleep; and Greece will awake no more. In 
Italy, however, the reaction of the Protestant 
propaganda has led to a quasi compromise, — the 
intellectual emancipation of the educated classes. 
By a system of mutual concessions, the lower 
orders have been abandoned to the wiles of their 
clerical obscurantists ; while scholars indulge in a 
scepticism that transcends all that Southern Eu- 
rope witnessed in the days of Lucretius and Dia- 
goras. The writings of Leopardi, Mundt, and 
Taine throw a curious light on this anomaly of 
social life, even in Rome itself.* 

* In the fifteenth century, the revival of classical studies 
led to a somewhat similar result. The Colonnas and Me- 
dicis protected several avowed free thinkers, and the Dic- 
tionary of the French Encyclopaedists has preserved the 
following anecdote: "Prince Flco de Mirandola once met 
Pope Alexander VI. at the house of the courtesan Emilia, 
while Lucretia, the holy Father's daughter, was confined 
in child-birth, and the people of Rome were discussing 
whether the child belonged to the pope, to his son Cesar, 
or to Lucretia's husband, Alphonso of Aragon, who was 

considered . The conversation immediately became 

animated and gay. Cardinal Bembo relates a part of it: 
*My little Pico,' says the pope, 'whom do you think the 
father of my grandson?' 'I think your son-in-law,' re- 
plied Pico. 'What! how can you possibly believe such 
nonsense?' 'I believe it by faith.' 'But, surely, you 

know that an cannot be a father.' 'Faith,' replied 

Pico, 'consists in believing things because they are im- 
possible. You require me to believe more incomprehensi- 
ble mysteries. Am I not bound to believe that had no 



112 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

In Switzerland, Hungary, and other countries of 
mixed races, a part of the populace had actually to 
be bribed to achieve their own salvation. Others 
merely exchanged creeds, and often adopted a 
gloomier though more consistent form of the old 
superstition, or yielded only to the eloquence of 
an inspired apostle. 

But, in the North, such arguments could be dis- 
pensed with. The nations of Northern Europe 
waited not for a reformer, but for a liberator ; and, 
when the intellectual support of a few prominent 
scholars and the political support of an influential 
prince had given Luther's enterprise the least 
chance of success, the moral support of the people 
took the form of a jubilant uprising, and the 
Protestant Revolt broke out like the torrent of 

eartlily father at all; that a serpent spoke; that from that 
time all mankind were damned; that the ass of Balaam 
also spoke with great eloquence; and that the walls of 
Jericho fell down at the sound of trumpets?' Pico thus 
proceeded with a long list of all the prodigious things in 
which he believed. Alexander absolutely fell back upon 
his sofa with laughing. 'I had better believe all that as 
well as you,' says he; 'for I well know that I can be saved 
only by faith, as I can certainly never be so by works.' 
'Ah, holy father,' says Pico, 'you need neither works nor 
faith: they are well enough for such poor profane creat- 
ures as we are; but you, who are absolutely a vice-god, 
you may believe and do just whatever you please. You 
have the keys of heaven, and St. Peter will certainly never 
shut the door in your face. But as for myself, who am 
nothing but a poor prince, I freely confess that I should 
have found some very powerful protection necessary, if I 
had employed the stiletto and nightshade as often as your 
holiness.' Alexander VI. understood raillery. 'Let us 
speak seriously,' says he to the prince. 'Tell me what 
merit there can be m a man's saying to God that he is 
persuaded of things of which, in fact, he cannot be per- 
suaded? What pleasure can this afford to God? Between 
ourselves, a man who says that he believes what is impos- 
sible to be believed is a humbug.' Pico de Mirandola at 
this crossed himself in great agitation. 'Mi Dio!' says 
he, 'I beg your Holiness' pardon, but you are not a Chris- 
tian.' 'Upon my faith,' says the Pope, 'I am not.' 
♦That's what I suspected,' says Pico de Mirandola." 



THE PROTESTANT REVOLT, 113 

a long-obstructed river. The common people took 
little interest in the theological subtleties of the 
dogmatic controversy : they had no cause to hope 
that the doctrine of the N'ew Testament could in 
any degree be reconciled with human reason ; but, 
with the broad instinct of self-preservation, they 
seized upon the main fact that the success of the 
insurrection meant liberation from the thraldom 
of an intolerable yoke. Their clear-seeing men 
foresaw that the wedge which now divided the 
power of the Church would soon split it into 
smaller and lighter pieces : they felt sure that, in 
the course of time, the antiseptic of free inquiry 
and the tonic of secular pursuits would eradicate 
the taint of anti-naturalism ; and, in the mean time, 
they accepted the dogmas of Luther as a man 
accepts the cow-pox, — as a protection from the 
danger of a more horrible disease. 

Martin Luther was not the first sect-founder 
who builded more wisely than he knew. Pythag- 
oras, who intended to introduce the superstition 
of the Hindu Gnostics, succeeded only in reform- 
ing the hygienic habits of his countrymen. Mo- 
hammed, the Unitarian revivalist, was inspired 
by a purely religious zeal. He recommended 
neither physical education nor the culture of the 
intellectual faculties, but he was wise enough at 
least not to depreciate them. They reconmiended 
themselves as means to his ends ; and, a hundred 
years after his death, the civilization of Islam 
rivalled the culture of Greece and Rome. Luther's 
chief purpose was to propagate his dogma of salva- 
tion by faith, etc., and to restore the theocracy of 



114 THE SECKET OF THE EAST. 

the early Christian churches ; but, before he could 
plant, he had to uproot, and this weeding of the 
soil revived the suppressed germs of Naturalism 
and Philosophy. And though, like Moses, he 
called himself a humble servant of God, it is 
certain that neither the diatribes of Martial and 
Demosthenes, nor the philippics of Dan ton, Mira- 
beau, and Lord Brougham, have ever equalled the 
tremendous emphasis of his invectives ; and to this 
negative preaching he owed his wonderful popu- 
larity. 

"Freedom awakened in every breast" ;* the mere 
rumor of the first success gained over whole cities 
and provinces; the nations of the North flew to 
arms, like the old Saxons at the return of their 
heroic chieftain; Northern Germany became the 
arena of an international war ; and after a struggle, 
in which the very earth seemed to rise in defence 
of her children, the enemies of nature were over- 
powered: the demon of the Buddhistic pest had 
found its victor. 

The leaders of the Reformation intended a Chris- 
tian-Patristic revival, but the soul of its success was 
a protest. 

*Es gereicht den alten Deutschen zum Buhm, 

Dass sie gehasst das Christenthum, 

Bis Kaiser Karolus leidigem Degen 

Die edleu Sacbsen unterlegen; 

Auch liaben sie lange genug gerungen, 

Bis endlich die Pfaffen sie hezwungen 

Und sie sich unter's Joch geduckt: 

Auch haben sie immer einmal gemuckt. 

Auch lagen sie niir in halbem Schlaf 

Als Luther die Bibel verdeutscht so brav; 

St. Paulus, ala ein Rittf^r derb 

Erschien den Rittern minder herb: 

Freiheit erwacht in jeder Prust; 

Wir protestiren alle mit Lust.— Wolfgang Goethe. 

(Recommended to the translators of the Goethe-worship- 
ping Concord School of Chrigtian Philosophy.) 



CHAPTER IX. 

REGENESIS. 

The night ends with storms; yet rejoice : They herald 
the Morning.— t/ean Paul. 

The history of Protestantism is the history 
of a progressive reform. When the congress of 
Westphalia accepted the terms of the Protestant 
princes, the power of anti-naturalism received its 
death-sentence; for, with the interests of the 
Christian religion, the right of free inquiry is as 
incompatible as sunlight with the interests of an 
owl-association. The spectres of the Middle Ages 
are fleeing from the morning air; dogma after 
dogma has silently evanished before the advance of 
that reform of which the Augsburg Confession 
was not the consummation, but the beginning. It 
is probable that few of the reformers could foresee 
the consequences of the movement they were set- 
ting forward, but the instinct of the people could 
not be deceived : they felt the true import of the 
great regenesis, and expressed their appreciation 
of its chief fact by the popular name of the cause 
of Protestantism. That protest has been repeated 
till we can no longer doubt that its causative prin- 
ciple is a revival of naturalism. The abolition of 
witchcraft laws, of religious disabilities and eccle- 
siastic privileges, the divorce of Church and State, 
secular education, civil marriages, our newspaper 



116 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

oracles, lecture-bureaus and cyclopasdias, our re- 
publics, our railways, telegraphs, telescopes and 
electric lights, our life insurances and lightning 
conductors, mechanics' institutes and gymnasiums, 
our zoological gardens, Sunday excursions and 
festivals of the Turner-bund, are strange com- 
ments on the theory of the sages who ascribe our 
superior civilization to the restoration of the pa- 
tristic dogmas. Anti-naturalism was not only the 
consequence, but the cause and essence of those 
dogmas. 

The ministers of pessimism still disregard the 
signs of dawn, or mistake them for the reflection 
of their mystic light; but they cannot help per- 
ceiving that the demand for consecrated candles 
has alarmingly decreased. Their didactic func- 
tions have been intrusted to the exponents of 
secular science ; their judicial and statistical func- 
tions to the municipal authorities; their tribunal 
of public censure has been surrendered to the 
public press ; and the very foundation of their 
spiritual authority has been undermined by the 
agencies of that ominous phase in the decadence 
of a creed which drives its ablest champions into 
the camp of the opposition. Two hundred years 
ago, a considerable plurality of our educated cler- 
gymen would have been burned as heretics; and 
the veil of external forms can hardly disguise the 
fact that the doctrine now preached in the city 
churches of the progressive nations is neither 
Romanism nor Calvinism, but eclectic casuistry. 
The signs of a progressing change are, indeed, 
getting distinct enough to be visible even through 



REGENESIS. 117 

the painted windows of tlie Roman cathedrals. 
The tenure of the infallible Church is in litiga- 
tion; her drafts on heaven are sadly below par; 
her Hades has changed its climate, as well as its 
name. The plan of pressing science into the 
service of dogmatism has only hastened the prog- 
ress of disintegration. Nature cannot be fought 
with her own weapons; by just as much as her 
enemies increase the knowledge of their disciples, 
they decrease their orthodoxy; the ministers of 
darkness try in vain to utilize the electric lights 
of civilization. 

Yet the church of natural religion is still a 
militant church. Pessimism is fighting its last 
battle with bitter obstinacy. The aggressive agen, 
cies of the Galilean Church have become obstruct- 
ive elements. The roars of the bestia trionfante 
have been silenced; the open war against truth 
has ceased, but her enemies still maintain a de- 
fensive warfare; such plain duties toward our 
fellow-men as the exposure of superstition and 
hypocrisy are still denounced as crimes against 
the majesty of our God. Monks and Puritans 
have ceased to enforce the worship of sorrow, but 
their influence still prevents the worship of joy; 
the poison of asceticism still blights our festivals ; 
the love of earth is still a stigma. The Stylites 
have descended from their columns; self-mutila- 
tion and self-torture have ceased their work of 
degeneration; but the regenerating influence of 
physical education has not yet been recognized; 
even in America, we have a hundred mythology 
schools for one gymnasium. Like the deities of 



118 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

the Roman Empire, the gods of pessimism have 
lost their thunder ; their butcher-priests have been 
disarmed, but their temples still cumber the land ; 
the embers of their altar-fires still cloud the sky 
wi<th their murky fumes. 

Yet the rising sun will soon dissipate those 
clouds. Our pilgrimage to the land of regenera- 
tion is not yet finished ; but the light of the new 
day has at least brought to view the goal of our 
journey, and will help us to avoid the obstacles of 
our path. The night-spectres flee. The morning 
sun begins to reveal the true form of the vampire 
whose loathsome embrace has sapped the life-blood 
of the last hundred generations. The demon of 
pessimism will not long hide his ghastly face under 
the guise of a heavenly messenger. One by one, 
his masks have dropped ; and the hour of deliver- 
ance is near, when the hand of science shall lift 
the veil of the Perversion-fallacy y — the last sophism 
that still enables the Galilean Church to deprecate 
the odium of their crimes against the happiness of 
the human race. The outrages against the friends 
of science and freedom, they say, were the conse- 
quences of a perverted creed, while the founders of 
that creed inveighed only against earthly desires, 
against unbelief, against the love of wealth, of 
sensual enjoyments, and worldly honors. "I did 
not destroy the flowers and fruits of the tree," says 
the fatuous gardener : "I merely aimed my blows at 
the base roots." 

The dupes of the perversion-fallacy see the con- 
trast between the lowly beginning and the out- 
rageous consequences of anti-naturalism, but they 



REGENESIS. 119 

fail to trace the inevitable sequence of cause and 
effect. They fail to see that the withering of the 
earthly roots of human life will equally blight the 
highest flowers of the spirit. They fail to see that 
decrepitude begets cowardice, meanness, and du- 
plicity; that destitution is a worse tempter than 
affluence ; that non-resistance leads to slavery ; that 
blind faith opens the door to imposture ; that the 
neglect of terrestrial affairs leads to moral and 
intellectual as well as material bankruptcy; that 
the spirit sickens with the body. They fail to see 
that a noble mind is a flower of which physical 
health is the stem and the root. 

The New Testament, in fact, contains all the 
seeds of the insane dogmas that turned the world 
of the Middle Ages into a mad-house. Not the 
outcome only, but the very source of the Galilean 
creed is an earth-blighting superstition. And, 
wherever the tendencies of our so-called Christian 
civilization have led to health and happiness, it 
proves that we have left the age of St. Augustine 
very far behind. It proves that the doctrine of 
pessimism has become untenable, that our earth 
has awakened from the fever-dream of the Middle 
Ages, that the healing powers of nature have at 
last prevailed against the most terrible disease of 
the human race. 

For a large number of our contemporaries, the 
day of deliverance has already arrived ; but no one 
deserves his liberty who does not contribute his 
share to the emancipation of his fellow-men. The 
bigotry of a besotted fanatic is hardly more con- 
temptible than the cautious selfishness of the 



120 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

man who silently enjoys the sweet air of freedom 
while thousands of his brethren sicken in the dun- 
geon of anti-naturalism. The agnostic and apathic 
creed of science must become a positive religion. 
The energy which we owe to the fear of disease 
should be inspired by the love of health. Before 
the end of this century, the protest against the 
enemies of nature should consummate its triumph 
in a gospel of earthly happiness. Religion must 
cease to be a synonyme of hypocrisy. 

The Religion of the Future will dispense with 
stakes and torture-chambers. It will employ no 
weapons but logic, no inquisition but the inquiry 
after truth. It will appeal to no higher canon than 
the progressive revelation of science. All the think- 
ers, discoverers, and reformers who were the ene- 
mies of religion will become its missionaries. Its 
work of redemption will not be achieved by the 
suppression, but by the encouragement of free in- 
quiry ; not by the renunciation, but by the promo- 
tion of temporal happiness ; not by ghost-stories 
and self-torture, but by natural science, Olympic 
festivals, outdoor life, social and educational re- 
forms, desert-redeeming forest culture, gymnastics, 
and health-schools. The path of its victory will 
not lead over the trampled flowers of this earth. 
The religion of nature will dispense with miracles. 
It will heal the sick by teaching them to avoid the 
causes of disease. It will help the poor by increas- 
ing their means of self-help : it will still their hun- 
ger after happiness with better fare than litanies 
and consecrated wafers. 

We may keep our altars ; but the priests of the 



KEGENESIS. 121 

future will not require the sacrifice of our reason, 
of our freedom and our natural affections, and 
will not reject an honest votary, though he should 
decline to hate his father and mother, — yea, and 
his own life. We shall worship our God in the 
temple of nature; and, if Paradise can be re- 
gained, we shall try to enjoy it on this side of the 
grave. 



APPENDIX. 



I. 

Indian Sources of the New Testament. 

The study of Comparative Mythology has estab- 
lished the rule that the metastasis of myths con- 
fines itself to a descending line of transmission. 
The attributes, doings, and sayings of national 
numina are transferred from gods to heroes, from 
heroes and demigods to favorite saints and politi- 
cal leaders, from exuberant and popular religions 
to inchoate and aspiring creeds. Sarama, the 
Spirit of the Dawn, becomes a Grecian Helena; 
the stronghold of the night-gods shrinks to a 
Mysian city; Wodan, with his celestial compan- 
ions, descends to the vault of a German castle or 
rides the storm-cloud through the midnight woods. 
A mythical hero of ancient Iran sinks to a Danish 
warrior, and finally to a Swiss peasant ; Venus be- 
comes a lamia ; Hertha, the earth-goddess, a nurs- 
ery witch. Conquered nations degrade their old 
idols, if they cannot preserve them on better terms. 
The priests and devotees of a newly promoted 
Olympian try to establish his claim by identifying 
him with a deity of superior rank. 

It is therefore not probable that the Krishna- 
tradition was transferred directly from Brahmanism 
to Christianity. Long before the advent of the 



APPENDIX. 123 

Galilean avatar, Krishna, the heaven-born lover of 
the milkmaids, had ceased to be the centre of a 
special worship. Buddhism had reacted on Brah- 
manism as the doctrine of Luther had reacted on 
the Catholic religion : It had forced the older 
creed to relinquish its exuberant myths, and re- 
treat to the stronghold of its essential dogmas. 
Those portions of the Krishna-legend which have 
blended with our gospel myths were probably 
transmitted through the medium of Buddhism, 
and, being confined chiefly to the infancy traditions 
of the two Messiahs, have no ethical importance 
whatever. 

Of far different significance is the concordance 
of Christianity and Buddhism. The character and 
the astounding number of their analogies not only 
reveal the genesis of the Christian myths, but 
also elucidate numerous otherwise obscure pas- 
sages in the parables and ethical precepts of the 
New Testament, and thus confirm the intrinsic 
proofs of its extra-Hebraic origin and its pessimis- 
tic tendency. 

The chronological subterfuge of the Christian 
apologists has been effectually disposed of. It had 
been supposed that the Lalita Vistara, the chief 
compend of the Buddha legend, was a Cingalese 
romance of comparatively recent date, and that its 
compilers might have availed themselves of West- 
Asiatic traditions. But the researches of Burnouf , 
"Wassiljew, Koppen, Max Miiller, Seydel, Julien, 
and Plath have most incontestably established the 
fact that Cingalese Buddhism, though a younger 
branch of the great Indian religion, has more 



124 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

faithfully than the northern sects preserved the 
original traditions of the Buddha Bible, and that 
the canonical recognition of the Lalita Vistara — 
not to mention the period of its development — far 
ante-dates those of the Christian gospels. Stan- 
islas Julien proved by an ancient Chinese cata- 
logue of the Kaygur scriptures that the Lalita was 
one of the books which in the first century of our 
'^N chronological era were translated from the old 
^ Indian originals, and that therefore, even at that 
early period, the Lalita was included among the 
canonical books of Buddhism. Besides, many of 
the most suggestive passages of the Cingalese 
gospel are found already in the Thibetan Hinay- 
dnas, which more than two centuries before Christ 
had taken rank among the sacred scriptures of the 
northern Buddhists. Plath demonstrates that 230 
B.C. the Ilinaydnas had already assumed their 
present form. Prof, Kudolph Seydel, the learned 
Christian apologist, admits that the canonical 
recognition of the Lalita cannot be assigned to a 
later period than twenty years after the birth of 
Christ. "But what would it avail us," he adds, 
"to postpone that date to the uttermost limit of 
possibility? We could not make it less incredible 
that the Buddhists should have copied from the 
legends of a creed which was then only in its 
cradle, and whose traditions had not even begun 
to crystallize into fixed forms." — (JDas Evangelium 
von Jesu, p. 79, Leipzig, 1882.) 

Especially since Buddhism was then in the very 
zenith of its vigor. The homage which the Jews, 
Christians, and Mohammedans have paid to the 



APPENDIX. 125 

founders of their religions, is frigid, compared with 
the fervor of devotional enthusiasm which gathered 
about the person of Buddha Sakyamuni. In Ceylon, 
the name of Gautama has twelve thousand syn- 
onymes. Compared with the self-tortures of the 
Buddhistic anchorites, the askesis of the Chris- 
tian monks looks like self-indulgence. Millions of 
Buddhistic laymen devoted a tenth part of every 
day to the study of their sacred scriptures, and 
committed whole books and chronicles to memory. 
And shall we believe that the priests of that 
religion — a religion which then counted its con- 
verts by hundreds of millions, and was daily 
preached from many hundred thousand pulpits — 
dared to adulterate their gospel with the traditions 
of a creed which, from their point of view, was 
professed only by a small sect of a contemptible 
and ignorant mountain tribe of Western Syria ? 
Suppose that the English translator of the Yulgate 
had tried his hand at a mediaeval romance : would 
any Protestant sect have attempted to enrich the 
New Testament with the adventures of Sir Lance- 
lot du Lac ? And can we believe that the Cingalese, 
the most orthodox sect of Buddhism, have thus 
tampered with the sacred canon of their HinayEna 
gospel ? It would not be more absurd if a thou- 
sand years hence a student of comparative mythol- 
ogy should assert that our new version of the 
Scriptures had been borrowed from the writings of 
Joseph Smith, or that the chronicle of the wars 
and adventures of Mohammed were a mere para- 
phrase of Voltaire's drama. 
On the other hand, no circumstance in ancient 



126 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

history is more clearly established thau the fact 
that, before the appearance of Christ, Buddhistic 
traditions and Buddhistic missionaries had reached 
the land of the Mediterranean nations. Like all 
great movements in the history of the human 
race, Buddhism at first advanced toward the setting 
sun, and only the recoil of its westward tide led to 
the inundation of Eastern Asia. Long before China 
and Siam were brought under the sway of the 
"Word," Buddhistic colonies had been planted 
beyond the Indus. Spiegel's translation of the 
Five Gathas Qjud Taranatha's History of Buddhism 
(translated by Wassiljew) mention Buddhistic mis- 
sions in Western Persia during the reign of Arta- 
xerxes Longomanus (about B.C. 450). Alexander 
Polyhistor describes the ascetic practices of Buddh- 
istic monks in Bactria, and speaks of self-tortur- 
ing hermits and mendicant orders; while in the 
Thirteenth Edict of Girnar, King Asoka, the "Con- 
stantine of Buddhism," refers to missionary em- 
bassies sent to the Y6na (Ionian or Greek) kings, 
Antiochus, Ptolemaus, Antigonos, and Magas. 
Under the reign of Artaxerxes Mnemon, the 
Grecian philosopher Ktesias gathered a large 
amount of curious information about India and 
Indian religions; and the historian Aristoxenos, 
a contemporary of Alexander the Great, mentions 
an Indian magus who visited Socrates and other 
philosophers — probably Pythagoreans — whose doc- 
trine of metempsychosis and abstinence from wine 
and animal food indicates an East Indian origin. 
When Alexander the Great returned to Persia, the 
Indian ascetic Calanos accompanied him to Per- 



APPENDIX. 127 

sepolis, and burned himself at the stake to demon- 
strate his indifference to earthly existence. Two 
hundred years before Christ, the city of Alassada, 
near the sources of the Oxus, was a central point 
of the West Buddhistic propaganda. The con- 
quests of Alexander established a constant inter- 
course between the Mediterranean and the western 
cities of Central Asia, caravans travelled to and 
fro, the Grecian colonists were probably as tolerant 
as their western countrymen, and the zealous mis- 
sionaries of the Cashmere convent towns can 
hardly have failed to avail themselves of such 
favorable opportunities. Clemens Alexandrinus, St. 
Jerome, and Suidas speak of a deified "Butta." 
Pliny (H. N. 37, 11) refers to the large overland 
trade between India and Cappadocia ; i.e., between 
the stronghold of Buddhism and a region which 
swarmed with Greeks, Jews, and the early prose- 
lytes of Christianity. The same historian (H. N. 
VL, 19, 22, 26) records the fact that the commerce 
by sea between India and Europe drained the 
Roman Empire of a yearly sum of fifty million 
sesterces, and that Indian ships with accommoda 
tion for five hundred passengers with their bag- 
gage and merchandise landed every year at Alex- 
andria and Syracuse. Among the ambassadors 
whom King Poros, or Paurava, sent to the court of 
Augustus, there was the Buddhist Zarmanochegas 
(Sramanacharya, i.e., teacher of Sramana, the doc- 
trine of self -mortification), who afterward went to 
Athens, and, like Calanos, burned himself on a 
funeral pyre to attest his belief in the worthlessness 
of earthly life. 



128 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

II. 
Coucordauce of Buddhism and Christianity. 

A. TRADITIONAL ANALOGIES. 

1. Both Buddha and Christ were of royal line- 
age. Both were born of a mother who, though 
married, was still a virgin. 

2. Both virgin mothers were overshadowed by 
the Holy Ghost, and, though found with child, 
remained immaculate. 

3. The birth of the future Saviour is announced 
by a heavenly messenger. The apparition which 
Maya sees in her dream informs her : "Thou shalt 
be filled with highest joy. Behold, thou shalt bring 
forth a son bearing the mystic signs of Buddh, a 
scion of royal lineage, a son of highest kings. 
When he shall leave his kingdom and his country 
to enter the state of devotion, he shall become a 
sacrifice for the dwellers of earth, a Buddha who to 
all men shall give joy and the glorious fruits of 
immortality." (Jigya Cher-rol-pan, 61, 63.) 

The angel says unto Mary : "Fear not, Mary, 
for thou hast found favor with God. And behold 
thou shalt bring forth a son and call his name 
Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the 
Son of the Highest ; and the Lord God shall give 
unto him the throne of his father David." (Luke 
i., 30, 31.) 

4. At the request of Maya, King Sudodhana re- 
nounces his connubial rights till she has brought 
forth her first son. {Rgya, 69-82.) "And Joseph 
knew her not till she had brought forth her first 
son.** (Matt, i., 25 ; Luke i., 39-56.) 



APPENDIX. 129 

5. The immortals of the Tushita-heaven decide 
that Buddha shall be bora when the "Flower-star" 
makes its first appearance in the east. (Lefmann, 
21, 124 ; Wassiljew, p. 95.) "Where is he that is 
born king of the Jews ? for we have seen his star 
in the east." (Matt, ii., 2.) 

6. A host of angelic messengers descends and 
announces tidings of great joy : "A hero, glorious 
and incomparable, has been born, a Saviour unto 
all nations of the earth ! A deliverer has brought 
joy and peace to heaven and earth." {Lotus, 102, 
104. Rgya, 89, 97.) "And the angel said unto 
them, Fear not ; for, behold, I bring you good tid- 
ings of great joy which shall be to all people. . . . 
For unto you is born this day a Saviour." (Luke 
ii., 9.) 

7. Princes and wise Brahmans appear with gifts, 
and worship the child Buddha. {Rgya, 97, 113.) 
*'And when they were come into the house, they 
saw the young child and worshipped him ; . . . and 
they presented unto him gifts, gold and frankin- 
cense and myrrh." (Matt, ii., 11.) 

8. The Brahmin Asita, to whom the Spirit has 
revealed the advent of Buddh, descends from his 
hermitage on Himalaya to see the new-born child. 
He predicts the coming kingdom of heaven and 
Buddha's mission to save and enlighten the world. 
(Sutta-Nipatha, iii., 11 ; Buddhist Birth Stories, 
i., 69.) "And it was revealed unto him by the 
Holy Ghost that he should not see death before he 
had seen the Lord's Christ. . . . Then he took 
him up in his arms, and blessed God, and said, 
Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace. 



130 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

. . . For mine eyes have seen thy salvation. ... A 
light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy 
people Israel." (Luke ii., 26.) 

9. Hymnic Intermezzos. — The Gospel of Luke, 
like the Lalita Vistara, abounds with hymnic rhap- 
sodies, which in the parallel passages of the Buddh- 
istic original harmonize with the spirit of the epic ; 
while, in the Christian chronicle, their abrupt in- 
troduction suggests omissions and arbitrary selec- 
tions. (Luke i., 13-17, 30-33, 35, 42-45, 46-55, 
67-79; ii., 10-14, 29-32, 34, 38; xix., 37.) 

10. The Abhinish-Kramana Sutra relates that 
the king of Maghada instructed one of his minis- 
ters to institute an inquiry whether any inhabitant 
of the kingdom could possibly become powerful 
enough to endanger the safety of the throne. Two 
spies are sent out. One of them ascertains the 
birth of Buddha, his tribe and dwelling-place, and 
the promise of his future glory. He makes his 
report to the king, and advises him to take meas- 
ures to exterminate the tribe. (Cf. Matt, ii., 1-11.) 

11. The Presentation in the Temple. — The 
princes of the Sakya tribe urge the king to present 
(or introduce) his son in a public assembly of 
nobles and priests. Spirits accompany the march 
of the procession ; inspired prophets extol the fut- 
ure greatness of the Messiah. The parallel story 
of Luke supplies the motive of the ceremony with 
the words: "As it is written in the law of the 
Lord." But diligent comparison of the sources 
of Hebrew law has revealed the fact that no such 
ordinance ever existed. The rite of purification 
merely required the mother to ofEer up a sacrifice. 



APPENDIX. 131 

a ceremony which demanded neither the presence 
of the husband nor of the child, the motive of 
the narrator's fiction being evidently the necessity 
of fitting the incident into a frame of Hebrew- 
customs. 

12. N'ames and Titles. — Among the twelve chief 
names of Buddha, — the Word, the All-wise, the 
Messiah, the Way, the Awakened, the Saviour, the 
Intercessor, the Truth, the Life, the Prince of 
Peace, the Good Shepherd, the Light of the World, 
— all but the second and fifth have been applied to 
the Prophet of Nazareth. 

13. Buddha's parents miss the boy one day; and, 
after searching for him far and near, they find him 
in an assembly of Rishis (sages of the past), who 
listen to his discourse and marvel at his under- 
standing. (Birth Stories, 74 ; Plath, xii., 2.) "And 
when they found him not, they turned back again 
to Jerusalem, seeking him. And it came to pass 
that, after three days, they found him in the temple, 
sitting in the midst of the doctors, both hearing 
them and asking them questions. And all that 
heard him were astonished at his understanding 
and answers." (Luke ii., 45-47.) 

14. Buddha, before entering upon his mission, 
meets the Brahmine Rudraka, a mighty preacher, 
who, however, offers to become his disciple. Some 
of Rudraka's followers secede to Buddha, but leave 
him when they find that he does not observe the 
fasts. (JRgya, 178, 214.) Jesus, before entering 
upon his mission, meets John the Baptist, who rec- 
ognizes his superiority. Two of John's disciples 
follow Jesus, who states his reasons for rejecting 



132 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

John's rigid observance of the fasts. (John i., 
37.) 

15. Buddha retires to the solitude of Uruvilva, 
and fasts and prays in the desert till hunger forces 
him to leave his retreat. (Rgya, 381; Oldenberg's 
Mahdvagga, p. 116.) "Then was Jesus led up of the 
Spirit into the wilderness, to be tempted by the 
devil. And, when he had fasted forty days and forty 
nights, he was afterwards a-hungered." (Matt, iv., 1. 

16. After finishing his fast, Buddha takes a bath 
in the river JSTairanjana. When he leaves the 
water, purified, the dsvas open the gates of heaven, 
and cover him with a shower of fragrant flowers. 
(Rgya, 259.) Comp. Matt, iii., 13. 

17. The Temptation. — During Buddha's fast in 
the desert, Mara, the Prince of Darkness, ap- 
proaches him, and tempts him with promises of 
wealth and earthly glory. Buddha rejects his pro- 
posals by quoting passages of the Vedas. The 
tempter flees : angels descend and salute Buddha. 
(Mara: Koppen, i., 88; Dhammapadam, vii., 33.) 
"And said unto him, All these things will I give 
thee, if thou wilt fall down and worship me. 
Then Jesus saith unto him, Get thee hence, Satan ; 
for it is written. Thou shalt worship the Lord thy 
God, and him only shalt thou serve. Then the 
devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and 
ministered unto him." (Matt, iv., 9-11.) 

18. Precursors. — During the transfiguration on 
the mountain, Christ is joined by Moses and Elias. 
Sakyamuni has frequent interviews with the two 
Buddhas who preceded him. (Seydel, 163.) 

19. Under the Fig-tree. — The shade of the sacred 



APPENDIX. 133 

fig-tree that shelters the meditating Buddha is the 
scene of the conversion and ordination of the first 
disciples, formerly followers of Rudraka. Christ 
chooses his first disciples from among the former 
followers of the Baptist; and in John i., 48, his 
remark about a fig-tree appears wholly incongruous 
and irrelevant to the context. In the answer of 
Nathanael, the circumstance of having been seen 
under a fig-tree is accepted as a proof of Christ's 
messiahship ! 

20. Disciples. — Before Buddha appoints a larger 
number of apostles, he selects five favorite disci- 
ples, one of whom is afterward styled the pillar of 
the Faith ; another, the bosom-friend of Buddha. 
Before Christ selects his twelve apostles, he chooses 
five chief disciples, among them Peter, the "rock 
of the Church," and John, his favorite follower. 
Among the followers of Buddha there is a Judas, 
Devadatta, who tries to betray his master, and 
meets a disgraceful death. (Koppen, i., 94 ; Lef- 
mann, 51 ; Birth Stories, p. 113.) 

21. Sakyamuni alludes to an interview with 
several former Buddhas. Sceptics question his 
statement: "Only forty years ago, you left your 
native town : how can you claim to have seen all 
those saints of old?" Buddha explains it by the 
pre-existence of his soul in other forms. {Lotus, 
xiv. and xv.) "Then said the Jews unto him, 
Thou art not yet fifty years old, and hast thou 
seen Abraham?" (John viii., 57.) 

22. The Macarisms. — The first words of Christ 
are the macarisms (blessings) in the Sermon of 
the Mount. When Buddha enters UDon his mis- 



134 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

sion, he begins a public speech (according to the 
French translation of Rgya, 355) : "Celui qui a 
entendu la Loi, celui qui voit, celui qui se plait 
dans la solitude, est heureux; Wi (a I'existence) au 
milieu des creatures vivantes, et ne faisant pas de 
mal, il est heureux dans le monde. Parvenu a se 
mettre au-dessus des vices, exempt des passions, 
11 est heureux; celui qui a dompt^ I'dgoisme et 
I'orgueil est parvenu h la supreme felicite" 

23. Buddha remains homeless and poor; re- 
peatedly instructs his disciples to travel without 
money, and trust to the aid of Providence. (Comp. 
Matt, iv., 23 ; viii., 20.) 

24. Ananda5 Buddha's favorite disciple, at the 
end of a wearisome journey, sits down near a 
well. A woman of the despised caste of the Chan- 
dalas appears with a water-jug. Ananda asks her 
for a drink of water. The woman warns him that 
he will lose caste by persisting in his request. 
Ananda laughs at her scruples; and, while they 
argue the question, Buddha comes up and approves 
the view of Ananda, who, as he perceives, has found 
favor in the eyes of the woman. (Burnouf's 
Divya-Avaddna.) Comp. John iv., 1-20. "He 
whom thou now hast is not thy husband." 

25. If thy right eye offends thee, pluck it out 
and cast it from thee. (Matt, v., 29.) According 
to Max Miiller's translation of the Ocean of 
Legends, a young monk of the mendicant order 
meets a rich woman who pities his hard lot, and 
wonders what could induce him to renounce the 
world. "Blessed is the woman," says she, "who 
looks into thy lovely eyes." "Lovely?" says the 



APPENDIX. 135 

monk. "Look here." And, plucking out one of his 
e V es, he holds it up, bleeding and ghastly, and asks 
her to correct her opinion. 

26. Miracles. — Buddha walks on the Ganges, as 
Christ on the lake. He heals the sick by a mere 
touch of his hand ; and, according to Wassiljew, 
the Mayana-Sutra relates the miracle of the loaves 
and fishes. Buddha repeatedly has a miraculous 
escape from the snares of his adversaries. "But 
he, going through the midst of them, went his 
way." (Luke iv., 30.) A transfiguration, ascen- 
sion, speaking in foreign tongues, are additional 
parallels. Buddha descends to hell, and preaches 
to the spirits of the damned. 

27. In the story of the blind man (John ix.), the 
disciples ask : "Who did sin, — this man or his 
parents?" The meaning of the question is re- 
vealed by the Buddhistic parable of a wilfully blind 
(obstinate) heretic, whose perversity is caused by 
his sins in a former existence. (Lotus, 82.) For, 
in the version of the gospel, the guilt of a man born 
blind could hardly be alleged as a cause of his 
misfortune ; while, in the Buddhistic original, the 
idea is in perfect harmony with the doctrine of 
metempsychosis. 

28. Instructions to disciples. — Lotus, v., 105 ; 
Gdtha, pp. 53, 143, 165, and other passages, repeat 
the injunction of self-denial, meekness, the duty of 
declining presents, often nearly in the words of 
Matt, vii., 6. Several of Buddha's disciples receive 
power to exorcise evil spirits. 

29. At the death of Buddha, the earth trembles, 
the rocks are split, phantoms and spirits appear. 



136 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

(Koppen, i., 114 ; Saint-Hilaire, 44 ; Seydel, 281.) 
" And, behold, the earth did quake, and the rocks 
were rent, . . . and the graves were opened, and 
many bodies of the saints which slept arose.'* 
(Matt, xxvii., 51-53.) 

B. DOGMATICAL ANALOGIES. 

1. Belief in the necessity of redemption by a 
supernatural mediator. 

2. The founder's exaltation to the rank of a 
God. Buddha is equal to Brahm ; demons are 
powerless against his word ; angels and Arhats 
minister unto him. 

3. Belief in a hell of fire and ceaseless torments. 

4. Belief in a prodigious number of malevolent 
demons. 

5. Demerit of wealth. " It is difficult to be rich 
and keep the way." 

6. Merit of mendicancy. Monastic brotherhoods 
resembling the order of St. Francis. 

7. The moral merit of celibacy. Abstinence 
from sexual intercourse a constitutional rule of 
Buddhistic convents and priest-schools. 

8. Rejection of ancient rites, sacrifices, etc. 

9. Monastic seclusion ; merit of a retired life ; 
hermitages and convents. 

10. Vanity of earthly joys. 

11. Depreciation of labor, industry, the pursuit 
of worldly advantage and worldly honors ; mo- 
nastic vows of poverty and obedience. 

12. The sinfulness of skepticism. 

13. Auricular confession of sins. 

14. Efficacy of vicarious atonement. 



APPENDIX. 137 

15. Inculcation of patience, submission, and self- 
denial ; neglect of the active, manly, and industrial 
virtues. 

16. Love of enemies ; submission to injustice and 
tyranny. 

17. Depreciation of worldly affections ; merit of 
abandoning wife and children. 

18. Trinity of holiest names, — Buddha, Dharma, 
and Sangha. Dharma is the "Word." "And the 
Word was with God." 

19. The worship of saints. 

20. Miracle-mongery. The chronicle of the 
Buddhistic church is overloaded with the records 
of prodigies. 

21. Evangelical analogies. — Buddha is called the 
"Light of the World" (^Gatha, p. 105). Buddha's 
mercy is compared to a rain cloud which showers 
blessings upon the just and unjust. Earthly joys 
are compared to the grass which blooms to-day and 
to-morrow is cast into the fire (Dhamm., 334). 
True believers are advised to gather treasures 
which neither thieves can steal nor fire or water 
can spoil (Lotus, 130). Ignorant teachers are lik- 
ened to the blind guiding the blind. The repent- 
ant sinner is described in a parable of a prodigal 
son, who wastes his substance in foreign countries, 
but at last returns to the house of his father, and, 
after serving him as a common day-laborer, is 
pardoned, and becomes the father's chief heir. 

C. CEREMONIAL ANALOGIES. 

Monasteries; nunneries; popery; the Thibetan 
Lama is worshipped as God's vice-regent upon 



138 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

earth; oecumenical councils; processions; wor- 
ship of relics; strings of beads; incense; confes- 
sion of sins ; chaplets ; service with double choirs ; 
pulpits ; dalmaticas ; a censer suspended from five 
chains; litanies; holy water; chalices; shaven 
polls ; priests go bareheaded ; weekly and yearly 
fasts; exorcism; division of temples into a nave 
and lateral halls; aspersion with consecrated 
water; bell-ringing; candlemas; feast of the 
Immaculate Conception ; masses for the repose of 
departed souls. 

The chief proof of the essential identity of the 
two creeds is the anti-cosmic principle, the nature- 
hating and earth-despising tendency which dis- 
tinguishes Buddhism and Christianity from all 
other religious systems. The gospel of Buddha, 
though a pernicious, is, however, a perfectly con- 
sistent doctrine. According to the ethics of Gau- 
tama, — "the Awakened," as his followers call him 
in distinction from benighted mortals, — birth, life, 
and rebirth is an eternal round of sorrow and dis- 
appointment ; the present and the future are but 
the upper and lower tire of an ever-rolling wheel 
of woe; existence is wholly evil, and the only 
salvation from the misery of life is the escape to 
the peace of Nirvana. The attempt to graft this 
doctrine upon the optimistic theism of Palestine 
has made the Christian ethics so inconsistent and 
contradictory. A paternal Jehovah, who yet eter- 
nally and horribly tortures a vast plurality of his 
children. An earth, the perfect work of a benevo- 
lent God, yet all a vale of tears, not made to be 
enjoyed, but only to be despised and renounced. 



APPENDIX. 139 

An omnipotent heaven, yet unable to prevent the 
intrigues and constant victories of hell. Chris- 
tianity is evidently not a homogeneous, but a com- 
posite, a hybrid religion ; and, considered in con- 
nection with the indications of history and the 
evidence of the above-named ethical and traditional 
analogies, these facts leave no reasonable doubt 
that the founder of the Galilean Church was a dis- 
ciple of Buddha Sakyamuni. 

Those who oppose this theory should, besides, 
remember that the question at issue is not between 
gospel truth and borrowed traditions, but between 
borrowed traditions and deliberate fiction; for 
that the narrative of the New Testament has no 
historic value admits of mathematical demonstra- 
tion. Not only does it abound with the records of 
prodigies at variance with the normal experience 
of mankind and entirely unsupported by the testi- 
mony of contemporary historians, but also with 
self-contradictions which remove the last doubt 
that the chronicle of the Synoptic Gospels, what- 
ever may be its origin, is not based upon facts. 



III. 
Historical Valne of the IVetr Testament* 

The following are a few of the self-evident 
proofs of the historical (and, a fortiori, canonicaV) 
value of the book which Prof. Christlieb calls "a 
canon which it has pleased the Lord to reveal and 
which the Lord's children are therefore bound to 
believe.'* 

In the first chapter of Matthew, the Lord reveals 
the fact that from the birth of Christ to the reign 



140 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

of David there were twenty-six ganerations, which 
are enumerated by name. In the Gospel of St. 
Luke, it has pleased the Lord to reveal a genealogy 
of forty-three names, of which only the first and 
last agree with that of the former list. 

Matthew also informs us that Herod ordered the 
massacre of an enormous number of young chil- 
dren, and that the parents of Christ saved their 
infant son only by a timely flight to Egypt. St. 
Luke does not mention the massacre, and states 
that the parents of Christ, instead of fleeing to 
Egypt, continued to dwell in their native city of 
Nazareth. (Luke ii., 22-39.) Josephus, who re- 
lates every trifling circumstance in the reign of 
Herod, especially the despotic acts of the viceroy, 
does not mention the murder of a single child. 

St. Matthew states that the name of Mary's 
father-in-law was Jacob. (Matt, i., 16.) Accord- 
ing to the Gospel of St. Luke, Dr. Christlieb is 
bound to believe that the gentleman's name was 
Heli. (Luke iii., 23.) 

Mark mentions that John was in prison when 
Jesus came into Galilee. John informs us that at 
that time John was not yet in prison. 

Matthew relates that the centurion came in 
person to beseech Christ in beh?Jf of his sick 
servant. Luke states that he sent the elders of 
the Jews. 

According to Mark (xv., 25), Jesus was crucified 
at the third hour. According to John (xix., 14, 
15), the preparation for the crucifixion only began 
at the sixth hour. 

St. Matthew (xxvii., 5) asserts that Judas 



APPENDIX. 141 

hanged himself. The Acts (i., 18) relate that he 
died in a different way. 

According to John, only one woman came to the 
sepulchre. According to Matthew, she was accom- 
panied by a namesake. Their statements might be 
reconciled, but Mark informs us that not less than 
three women came together. But, even that must 
be an underestimate, for Luke assures us that 
there were more than four women. 

Matthew and Mark's women saw an angel at the 
sepulchre : Luke's more numerous witnesses oblige 
us to believe that they saw two angels; but the 
dim religious light of the tomb may have confused 
their vision, for, while Matthew informs us that the 
apparition was seen without the sepulchre, John and 
Mark admit that it was seen within. Mark's state- 
ment that they reached the sepulchre at the time 
of the rising sun is no positive counterproof, for 
John confesses that they reached it while it was 
yet dark. Matthew's angel was sitting down. 
Luke's angels did not think it proper to keep their 
seat in the presence of so many ladies. 

Matthew and Luke state that the women hastened 
to carry the news to the disciples. Mark (whose 
women had reached the sepulchre after daylight) 
admits that they had no excuse for saying any- 
thing to anybody. 

If we shall believe Matthew, Jesus was three 
days and three nights in the grave. The account 
of Mark implies that he was resurrected during the 
second night. 

According to Luke, the ascension of Christ took 
place at Bethany. The Acts (i., 9, 12) state that 



142 THE SECRET OF THE EAST. 

he ascended from Mount Olivet. Both accounts 
differ from that of Luke (xvi., 19). 

In the Gospel of St. Matthew, we are informed 
that at the death of Christ "there was darkness 
over all the land from the sixth hour unto the 
ninth." The veil of the temple was rent, the 
earth quaked, the rocks split, and troops of corpses 
sallied from their tombs and availed themselves of 
the opportunity to visit their metropolitan friends. 
St. Mark and St. Luke do not think it worth 
while to report such trifles. St. John, an eye- 
witness of the crucifixion, does not allude to them. 
Josephus, in his detailed history of the same time 
and the same country, never mentions them. The 
Roman historians, whose countrymen ruled all 
Syria and Asia Minor, mention nothing of the 
kind. Can we doubt that the rumbling of Mat- 
thew's earthquake was the echo of that East Indian 
tradition which the writers of the New Testament 
mistook for the revelation of the Lord? When 
Buddha, the saviour, died at Kusinagra, the earth 
quaked and the rocks were rent, phantoms as- 
cended from their caves, and the nine heavens 
were darkened, as well as the earth. 



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